Dr John C. Clark, a scientist who disarmed atomic bombs twice
109 comments
·May 27, 2025bdbenton5255
wahern
Maybe I'm misunderstanding why you juxtaposed your statement about repurposing nuclear weapons and the quote, but isn't the quote suggesting that nuclear weapons are those ultimate warriors that will bring an end to bloodshed? It seems like an artful allusion to the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction and the claim that MAD prevents wars.
junon
It depends on the way you read it. Nuclear bombs cause bloodshed. The blood might be vaporized, cooked, or irradiated - but still shed.
I don't think that's what OP meant; rather I read it literally, to mean one day there might actually be a world without war, or at least, a world without violent wars.
leesec
>Nuclear bombs cause bloodshed.
No they prevent and drastically reduce bloodshed.
gjm11
I can't find this in The Art of War (but maybe I missed it?). Nearest I can find in this translation https://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html is:
6. Therefore the skillful leader subdues the enemy's troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field.
7. With his forces intact he will dispute the mastery of the Empire, and thus, without losing a man, his triumph will be complete. This is the method of attacking by stratagem.
and maaaaybe the original text underlying some of that could also be translated as the second sentence in the alleged quotation. But the bit about "an ultimate class of warriors" seems really fishy to me.
[EDITED to add:] Ah, looking at a picture of the thing, it says "adapted from Sun Tzu, The Art of War". Seems like a pretty loose adaptation.
crossroadsguy
The only way we will, now that the genie is out of the bottle, not need these weapons is when we will have easy and affordable (for nation states) ways to neuter a nuclear attack which is as likely as the earth being peaceful and filled with bonhomie unlike anytime in history ever.
Besides if (and that’s some “if”) that happens that means the world has already found something more deadly and again some people will suddenly grow very mature insights on this and after destroying few cities they would totally focus on an initiative that ensures only they get to keep those weapons and every other nation should voluntarily sign up for it. And this is the main reason we will never get rid of deadliest of weapons and the endless quest for them.
LorenPechtel
Disagree. You're assuming nothing upsets the balance. I'm thinking of the Hammer's Slammers books. For those who haven't read them: a reasonable extrapolation of future tech with one big change: Cartridge-based energy guns. They are lightspeed weapons, no leading your target or the like. Center it in the optics and you'll hit it. The skies are nobody's friend, no aircraft, ballistic weapons are generally not of much use. The only combat rockets are ultra high acceleration short range stuff that's based on getting through before it can be tracked and engaged by the defense mounts. While nukes exist they don't get used because they're just going to be picked off. Against missiles you can make your warheads salvage fuse (messes up the tracking against the next missile), but you can't detect a lightspeed weapon until it hits.
energy123
Nukes come from security competition between nation states. It's the anarchic nature of this security competition that necessitates nukes.
The only way to avoid this is a one world government.
The analogy is: the existence of police is the only reason you don't need to own a gun. Without police, it's anarchy, and therefore you need a gun to survive in that incentive structure.
BurningFrog
A single world government that you can't possibly escape from is vastly worse than nuclear weapons.
I expect it would evolve to something like current day China.
crossroadsguy
That would be worse than nukes. We already see what UN and UNSC has become. Even hearing the “one world” government gave strong star wars vibes even though I didn’t need to go that far.
We are designed (or destined, if you want to say so) to be fucked and fuck up everything on this earth faster than we thought maybe even just 20-30 years ago.
NoMoreNicksLeft
>The only way to avoid this is a one world government.
Plainly false. But even if that were true, then the cure's worse than the sickness.
Let's have a planet with 100,000 sovereign governments. Tiny city-states that neither have the mineral resources to build those nor the wealth to attempt it.
XorNot
Defending against a nuclear attack though isn't a desire for peace, it's a desire for freedom of action without consequence.
In a world with nuclear weapons and limited, unreliable defenses against them, you have to actually fully comprehend what "wanting peace" actually means - i.e. negotiation and diplomacy are the actual kings.
In a world without them, you always have the option of resorting to the barrel of the gun again - as happened to prior to WW2.
dmbche
I don't think reliable defenses against nukes can exist can they? Airbursting nukes high enough causes emp events and the irradiated material still floats around - that's without the assymetry in cost in trying to hit 100% of decoys produced by the nuke, stopping a single nuke is at least an order of magnitude more expansive than sending one - I don't think it could really be done!
ssivark
> "Someday, an ultimate class of warriors will evolve, too strong to be contested. They will win battles without having to fight, so that at last, the day may be won without shedding a single drop of blood."
With such power asymmetries, the "bleeding" might merely be displaced to after the battle is settled. Look at the history of how colonialism played out.
nssnsjsjsjs
Yes those victorious warriors will find a way to split into 2+ warring factions.
elmomle
If that were to happen then they would not be this ultimate class of warriors.
nssnsjsjsjs
They may be great warriors but bad diplomats
latexr
> Maybe, just maybe, one beautiful day we will live in a world where there are no nuclear weapons nor need for them.
We already live, and have since forever, in a world that does not need nuclear weapons.
> A quote from Sun Tzu
The logical outcome of which being that whoever controls that class of warriors controls the world. I’m not convinced, despite what the quote seems to imply, that is better than never again shedding blood.
With all due respect to ancient Chinese wisdom, Sun Tzu had no concept of atomic bombs, autonomous drones, and weaponised diseases.
NoMoreNicksLeft
>These weapons cannot be used ethically,
I disagree. Our most dangerous enemies aren't even human. On the off chance the little green men show up, let's have something with a bit more oomph than polite rebuke. Just in case.
>"Someday, an ultimate class of warriors will evolve, too strong to be contested. They will win battles without having to fight, so that at last, the day may be won without shedding a single drop of blood."
This is just silly. What if those warriors want to ban abortions and library books? Will you be satisfied that their fighting prowess grants them the power to dictate that to you? Do you believe that there's some mystical connection between that strength and your particular ethical perspective?
LorenPechtel
Disagree, Kzinti Lesson.
It's pretty much impossible to come up with a stardrive that doesn't have a weapon potential that makes nukes look like firecrackers.
1) The direct Kzinti Lesson: Anything that can push a ship to relativistic velocity produces incredibly energetic exhaust. The efficiency of the drive is directly related to how well you can point it in one direction, thus making it very hard to make something that isn't a weapon. And in a population-attack scenario such a starship throwing rocks is devastating. At 86% of lightspeed a rock hits with it's annihilation energy. At 94% of lightspeed it hits as hard as if it were antimatter.
2) Jump drives (whatever you call them) still need to get somewhere without waiting years. While it doesn't have nearly the planet-killing potential of a relativistic starship it's still quite capable of throwing city-killers.
3) Intertialess (Lensman series). No direct weapon potential but they knew they couldn't crack the defenses of Jarvenon--so the slapped inertialess drives to a couple of planets and used them as a nutcracker.
Known physics only leaves the first scenario as possible, I threw out the others to cover the various sci-fi drives. I can't think of any story that uses something that doesn't fit one of these three categories.
SaberTail
On the one hand, it sounds very stressful. On the other hand, if you screwed up, you wouldn't even notice because your brain would be obliterated before it would register.
randerson
And if you're successful, imagine how well you'd sleep that night.
sriram_malhar
If it were me, I'd be hopped up on so much adrenaline that I'd probably not sleep for days!
HPsquared
A bit like Pascal's Wager.
Razengan
Your and a million other brains so no one would be left to know badly you fucked up either!
genter
This was in the desert in Nevada. It was just him and one other person.
cryptonector
Two other men.
| Once at the base of the 300-foot-tall shot tower with a live atomic bomb on its top, the three men got ready for their ascent.
neilv
The same article mentions what sounds like a worse job:
> The 701st soldiers were guinea pigs for evaluating the bomb’s flash, burn and shock-wave effects under field conditions.
seanthemon
Several countries used their men as guinea pigs for nuclear tests.
Most notably was a video I watched of British soldiers going through the same thing, the anecdote of seeing bones through your hand when you try to cover your eyes is haunting.
https://www.forcesnews.com/nuclear/britains-nuclear-bomb-gui...
shusaku
I have to say, including that detail was outstanding writing. It really upped the suspense and sense of horror even though you knew they’d make it out alive.
DrScientist
> The 701st soldiers were guinea pigs for evaluating the bomb’s flash, burn and shock-wave effects under field conditions.
Yet somehow the story is about a hero that disarmed a bomb - not that he had tried to set off and test the effects on almost 1000 soldiers....
A cool customer in more ways than one....
Arch-TK
He would most likely have been there with those 1000 soldiers. The tests were intended to put you close enough to see and hear the blast but not close enough to be either scorched or significantly irradiated.
Specifically the tests were aimed at training soldiers on what to expect from a nuclear blast and to see how those soldiers would react.
Presumably if the US (or some other nation) was to drop a bomb in an area with deployed soldiers, they wanted to make sure the soldiers would still be able to perform as expected.
cryptonector
> Presumably if the US (or some other nation) was to drop a bomb in an area with deployed soldiers, they wanted to make sure the soldiers would still be able to perform as expected.
There's other cases to consider:
- the enemy drop bombs near our men
- we drop bombs near enemy men
In each case how the impacted soldiers react would be interesting and somewhat predictive of the other cases.
DrScientist
Of course they aren't close enough to get obliterated - however there are well documented occasions where soldiers were placed so scientists could study the effects of radiation exposure ( among other things ).
Look up Operation Desert Rock.
sgjohnson
> is the worst job in the world
Is it though? You either succeed, or nothing is ever your problem again.
cubefox
It is. Death is bad because we don't want to die, not (just) because it tends to hurt.
_Algernon_
Everyone will die at some point anyways and instant nuclear obliteration seems like the better way to go compared to slowly vegetating away in a hospital bed or the infinite number of painful ways to die.
hoppp
Its not just about how, but when.
I prefer to die a vegetable at 80 than die from a nuclear blast at 40. All those years can be spent existing happily
flowerthoughts
It's absolutelty an irreversible hysteresis. That's more about not wanting to have fear for dying. After the actual dying, you (probably) don't have a desire to be alive, so the only real problem is the fear leading up to it.
gjm11
This is wrong.
I would prefer not to die soon, not only because it would be unpleasant but also because my death would be inconvenient for my employer, distressing for my friends and family, bad for charities I donate to, etc. And also because there are various things I would like to do that, if I get hit by a car tomorrow, I will never get to do.
(The last sentence is debatable. You might say that my preferences just evaporate and stop mattering at all when I die. I wouldn't agree, but I don't have a knock-down counterargument.)
hinkley
Getting blown up by enough high explosives to detonate a nuclear device is not painful at all. You’ll be about as dead as the Deepwater Horizon people.
ggm
Joseph Karneke, a ww2 navy clearance diver also did some bomb test related checks on dud/failed devices. It's at the end of his autobiography.
fraserphysics
Here are a couple of related jobs that could be in a movie:
1. Disabling a terrorist weapon. When you find a mysterious box in NYC making ticking noises and emitting radiation, who you gonna call?
2. Forensics and attribution. When 1 fails how do you figure out what happened and who is responsible?
ranger207
IIRC from a Tom Clancy novel that dealt with that (Sum of All Fears?) the precise mix of isotopes in the fallout can pinpoint exactly where the material was refined, which can help pinpoint where it might've been lost
protocolture
Always wondered whether that was something Tom Clancy had actually researched or whether he pulled it out of his ass.
exmadscientist
Isotopic origin analysis is a very real technique, and it can be used for more than just nuclear materials. For example, it's often possible to pinpoint which mine a sample of metal ore came from. It's not foolproof, of course, and it requires a lot of data to pull off usefully, but it sure isn't fiction.
nthingtohide
Wrt disabling enemy satellites by destroying them to pieces, we can create more problems, the so called space debris chain reaction Kessler Syndrome.
Watch at 0:40 @ Space War is Real, Here's How it Works
> Kessler Syndrome is a hypothetical scenario, proposed by NASA scientist Donald Kessler in 1978, where a chain reaction of collisions between space debris and satellites leads to a catastrophic increase in debris, potentially rendering Earth's orbit unusable. This increase in debris would make space travel and communication more dangerous and difficult.
Can countries actively plan strategies to use Kessler Syndrome to their advantage? Can Starlink satellites be destroyed easily by this method since they are present in the same orbit?
wat10000
It’s strange how the brain works. In terms of your personal survival if something goes wrong, there’s no difference between disarming a nuclear bomb and, say, a 500lb conventional bomb. But the nuke feels much scarier, at least when reading about it from the comfort of my home.
null
Simulacra
What saddens me is that I can't find hardly any information about this guy. John Charles Clark. Nuclear triggerman, and one very brave person. Very little written about him.
tetris11
same, nothing on wikipedia
john-h-k
I’ll happily admit if I was asked to do this I’d run away screaming.
That being said, once it’s failed detonation (and you’ve cut off any possible signals to the detonator), wouldn’t you roughly expect it to be as dangerous as transporting one?
They mention the large chunk of ̶h̶i̶g̶h̶ secondary* explosive in there, but the key attribute of ̶h̶i̶g̶h̶ secondary explosives - by definition - is how hard they are to actually trigger. So the only failure mode is “somehow the detonator itself has entered a state that did not detonate with the initial signal, but will eventually detonate after >1hr”, which you’d _hope_(!) it was wired to prevent.
Again, I’d shit myself immediately in this scenario. Just interesting from an engineering perspective
*see comment below, `high` explosive does not mean "hard to detonate". Cursory searches for the [limited] information on the trigger-explosive used in nuclear weapons suggest they were mostly secondary explosives, and also will probably have put me on a new watchlist!
LorenPechtel
Primary explosive: Sensitive, used in very small quantities to initiate the main charge.
Secondary explosive: Takes quite a bit of energy to initiate and therefore reasonably stable.
High explosive: I forget the exact technical distinction from low explosive, but it refers to how it goes off, not how energetic it is.
In the real world nobody but a terrorist uses any more of a primary explosive than is needed to set off the secondary, and they are kept apart for as long as possible. You put the charge in place then you insert the detonator cap.
However, these are nukes. Obviously, we don't know details but there's another technology in use: exploding blast wires. A blast wire has no primary explosive, it is set off by pushing a huge current through a tiny wire. This is done both for timing reasons (you need great precision in imploding the plutonium) and because primary explosives cook off in fire. Secondary explosives often do not. While the heat causing a detonator to cook off isn't going to produce a nuclear yield it would still make an awful mess.
kadoban
> They mention the large chunk of high explosive in there, but the key attribute of high explosives - by definition - is how hard they are to actually trigger.
I think the term you might mean is "secondary explosive"? Because as stated this is _very_ wrong. Nitroglycerine is a high explosive. Nitrogen triiodide is a high explosive. Not really compounds known for being hard to trigger, unless you consider a light featherdusting to be rough treatment.
Otherwise I suspect you have a good point, just the terminology seems wrong to me.
john-h-k
Yes, I am wrong it seems. I am unsure where I got the high<->secondary mixup from, I'm sure I saw something talking about high explosive and defining it strictly as "needs supersonic shock wave to initiate", but have just checked and can't find anything saying that. Will edit my prior comment, thanks
kadoban
I'm far from an expert (I just like fun parts of youtube xD) but I'm wondering if the terms just get conflated because the only high explosives anyone will use a large amount of by choice are the stable ones, so they're (almost?) all secondaries too.
jiggawatts
Ironically, compared to — say — landmines, nuclear weapons are very “safe” by design. Many things need to be triggered “just so” to blow one up even conventionally, let alone as a proper nuclear weapon.
For example, they use only insensitive explosives. The trigger is purely electric and needs a lot of power.
Just pull the battery and it’s a solid inert lump.
Also the plutonium “physics package” is less radioactive than you would think. It’s safe to handle with just gloves for short periods.
dreamcompiler
If you banged on a modern nuclear weapon for an hour with a 2 kg hammer, you'd have a sore arm. Soak it in warm water and take an aspirin.
If you sawed into one with a metal cutting saw, it would just quietly turn itself into a brick.
Nuclear weapons are designed to be both tough and delicate (meaning: they like to brick themselves) at the same time. An extraordinary amount of clever engineering across decades has made them this way.
LorenPechtel
Disagree on the just part. A metal cutting saw into plutonium wouldn't exactly be good for your health. So long as it sits there as a sphere it's not going to hurt you, but it's way down there on the periodic table where basically everything is pretty toxic. You do not want to inhale the dust!
jiggawatts
Reminds me of this quote from XKCD What If?
> But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool.
> “In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”
amelius
I'm curious why they don't add a second, conventional, explosive to the device that detonates a few seconds later and destroys the primary trigger system and makes it less likely that anything will detonate later in case of a malfunction of the primary trigger.
jiggawatts
Think of nuclear bomb design as the direct inverse of landmine design. With the latter you want it to blow up under a wide range of circumstances, including if it is "tampered" with. You want sensitivity, within some wide range.
A significant concern with nuclear weapons is that they're small enough to steal.
You definitely do not want thieves or terrorists to be able to trigger a nuke.
So the trigger systems for nuclear weapons are encrypted and require a decryption key to be functional.
A key requirement for a successful (nuclear) detonation is nanosecond-level timing control of the explosion. Anything else will result in a fizzle with the conventional explosives just scattering the nuclear material in a small area.
It's possible that some nukes had deliberate self-destruct modes where the circuitry would react to tampering by triggering an asymmetric explosion, causing a fizzle, which is relatively harmless to city-sized targets.
amelius
Yes, what I mean is that the anti-tampering self-destruct mode could also be activated after the main device is triggered. That way, if the main device does not detonate, at least you know it will never detonate on its own (since all of the circuitry has been destroyed).
jonstewart
All except Little Boy…
FridayoLeary
Don't think that he didn't take every possible precaution:
>Clark averted his eyes and lowered the car’s sun visor in case the device did go off and its flash caught him by surprise.
Nuclear weapons can be repurposed for nuclear energy. Maybe, just maybe, one beautiful day we will live in a world where there are no nuclear weapons nor need for them. These weapons cannot be used ethically, they poison the soil, air, and water.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
A quote from Sun Tzu is etched in stone at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site just outside the Pine Ridge Native American Reservation:
"Someday, an ultimate class of warriors will evolve, too strong to be contested. They will win battles without having to fight, so that at last, the day may be won without shedding a single drop of blood."