6

Decentralized network Source Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

War against the CenterPETER GALISON

1 DispersionIn the 1980s we learned to view postmodernist architecture as a formof de-centering a dispersion of form and function away from the criti-cal node For half a century the Empire State Building had stood formodernism pinpointing not only the symbolic dead center of NewYork City but even focusing its own central axis around its needlelikeantenna When postmodern theorists like Fredric Jameson sought tocontest that centripetal force of modernism they gestured to the WestinBonaventure Hotel with its repetitious cylindrical structures iteratingelevators and escalators so numbingly that visitors wandered disori-ented unable to nd the same place twice For David Harvey and otherlate-twentieth-century theorists of urban design the postmodern cele-brated ldquodispersed decentralized and deconcentrated urban formsrdquo thathad become ldquotechnically possiblerdquo only in the previous decade Themodernist trope of concentration became that postmodernist dispersalcohesion shifted to fragmentation and metropolis to counterurban-ization1 A city-world more like William Gibsonrsquos Sprawl seemed inthe ofng for the early twenty-rst century rather than the compact starof Walter Benjaminrsquos Paris radiating from its heart capital of the nine-teenth century Our vision of the late twentieth century an urban geog-raphy of Deleuzian rhizomes burrowing every which way withoutbeginning or endmdashno tracking back to an ultimate origin center orpeak no hierarchy in short an end to the modernist arboreal dreamorganizing all around a rooted center predicated on located cities cen-tered societies and integral psyches

Among the many meanings of postmodernism (historical quotationstylistic pastiche multiple coding depthless meaning) the removal ofhierarchy was crucial for the move toward counterurbanization easilyadapting itself to the 1990s salvational narrative in which the Internetstarred as postmodern democratic and liberatory (Even the briefestof Web searches yields hundreds of sites with titles like ldquoInternet =Postmodernismrdquo or ldquoThe Internet as Post-Modern Culturerdquo2) How didwe lurch from the centered modernism to this aesthetic architecturaleconomic and according to some metaphysical placelessness Lessclear For Harvey and Jameson the underlying transformation in thedisposition of buildings and cityscapes lay in the ever-widening gyrationsof multinational corporations the cultural logic as Jameson put it of

Grey Room 04 Summer 2001 pp 6ndash33 copy 2001 Grey Room Inc and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 7

late capitalism Others like Charles Jencks mapped the de-centering backto a cultural context of literary theory and philosophy More recentwork by Peter Rowe and others importantly attends to the remarkablejuxtaposition that has characterized suburban growthmdashon the one handpulling toward technical rational planning and on the other toward anarcadian imaginary3

Here I would like to point toward an architectural dispersion ratherless abstract than that celebrated by a generalized zeitgeist by a shift inan economic base ldquoreectedrdquo in the cultural superstructure by an epochalpostwar taste change toward suburban life or by an entropic ow awayfrom an ordered city core No doubt such intellectual pragmatic aestheticand stochastic drives did contribute to the pressure driving dense citycores outward But today I want to begin elsewhere Not in 1973 with theoil crisis and subsequent economic upheaval nor with the social upheavalsor deconstructivist literary-theoretical work of the 1960s Nor for thatmatter will I start with the Internet though I will come back to it

Instead I will address bombs the bombs of the long war that in acertain sense began in the 1930s accelerated after the Nazi seizureof power continued across the end of World War II through the coldwar and even past the fall of the Soviet Union into the present unset-tled moment But we need to step back two decades before the 1960s

As British and American planners began designing their strategiesfor the massive bombing campaign of the war the targeters joined theelite civilian sectors of law business academic social science and eco-nomics Together they composed the Army Air Forcersquos Committee ofOperations Analysts ldquoOperations analysisrdquo was essentially a methodi-cal theoretical reconstruction of the interconnections that held togetherthe German economy and war machine and that asked how it could beblown apart Where they asked were its nodal points the linchpinsthat when pulled would topple the economy forcing the Nazi warmachine to a halt Analyzing this whole processmdashthat is the effects ofthe bombing effortmdashwas the US Strategic Bombing Survey foundedin 1944 while Flying Fortresses were still leaving each day for Germantargets from the airelds of East Anglia The Survey was an immenseaffair employing well over a thousand people including as ldquodirec-torsrdquo specic mostly industrial experts on their topics For examplethe head of a major mining rm directed work on munitions the exec-utive vice president and general manager of Standard Oil directed thepetroleum division and a former vice president of the Curtiss-WrightCorporation ran the Aircraft Division Appropriately enough FranklindrsquoOlier president of Prudential Insurance ran the whole of the Surveymdashthe greatest damage-assessment program in history Among the majorgures running other divisions were John Kenneth Galbraith (overall

8 Grey Room 04

Organization chart US StrategicBombing Survey (USSBS)Source US Strategic BombingSurvey Overall Report (EuropeanWar) 30 September 1945reprinted with an introduction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976)

economic effects) George Ball (transportation) and Paul Nitze (equipmentand utilities)4 Starting on the lower rungs of the ladder were Marxisteconomist Paul Baran and poet W H Auden5

One of the rst targets was the Luftwaffe itself a task in destructionthat the Army Air Force aimed to complete by pulverizing airframe fac-tories This proved vastly more difcult than the Allies expected Afterdismissing the Versailles agreement forbidding the construction of airpower the Nazi regime hammered into place a German air forceproofed as far as possible against enemy attack Emphasizing protec-tion for their factories against air raids the Luftwaffe planners sited newplants away from frontiers in suburban or country districts concealingstructures deploying camouage separating buildings within the plantsand providing on-site air raid shelters for workers The Reich pooledpatents and structured the airframe ldquocomplexrdquo so that spatially separatedplants could stamp out replaceable segments of their completed prod-uct It was an efcient powerful apparatus that as the Survey promptlyconceded continued to produce an abundance of ghters and bomberseven under the years-long rain of explosives6

Responding to some fourteen attacks on the German aircraft industrybetween July and December 1943 the Germans dispersed their facto-ries as rapidly as they could For example initial American and Britishattacks against the Focke-Wulf plant at Bremen and the Heinkel plant atRostock were not very successful worse for the Allies the bomb runsled the German authorities to splinter Focke-Wulf production from the heartland in Bremen into East Prussia and Poland Not only did this dispersal open new forced labor supplies to the Nazis but it would also the Germans believed put the plants out of harmrsquos rangeLarge-scale dispersion began during the Allied assault of the secondhalf of 1943 and compulsory dispersion took hold in February 19447

Galison | War against the Center 9

To realize these goals Albert Speerrsquos assistant Karl-Otto Saur createda vast ldquoghter staffrdquo from which one member was dispatched perma-nently to every airframe factory in the Reich even as the fighter staffpartitioned the factories into hundreds of sites many of which stood inforest clearings8 Acknowledging the success of the dispersal programthe Strategic Bombing Survey allowed that Nazi airframe productionactually increased during 1944 They concluded that Germany lostcontrol of the air not by a lack of planes but by the shortage of well-trained pilots and aviation fuel

But the operations analysts selecting targets were not just after par-ticular pieces of munitions factories their goal was to precipitate a col-lapse of the German economy as a whole To that end they directed aseries of studies designed to locate just those plants where destructionwould cause shortages to ripple through the entire system Operationsfollowed Henry ldquoHaprdquo Arnold for example tempted Harry Hopkinswith the notion that blasting the German ball bearing industry ldquowouldprobably wreck all German industryrdquo9

At the top of the Alliesrsquo bombing priority list stood ball bearingswithout which they reckoned German machinery would quite literallygrind to a halt As the authors of the Strategic Bombing Survey put it

On the afternoon of the 17th of August 1943 some 200 FlyingFortresses flying from their bases in England deep into Bavariaand unescorted after reaching the German border struck the rstgreat blow aimed at the complete destruction of an entire andessential segment of the German war economy10

Some 52 percent of German bearing production lay in an enormousfactory complex at Schweinfurt US Army Air Force planes hit the

10 Grey Room 04

city with some four hundred tons of bombs while the Germans struckdown thirty-six of the attackers The raids continued with some eleventhousand tons of bombs dropped the most destructive of which tookplace on 14 October 1943 Again over two hundred planes descendedon the plant letting loose 450 tons of high explosives and incendiariesdestroying 10 percent of the machinery 20 percent of the stock and350000 square feet of plant German antindashaircraft batteries and ghtersshot down an even greater number of planes than on the earlier bigraid killing some six hundred airmen As a direct result of that attackSpeer near panic put his closest associate Philip Kessler in charge ofprotecting and dispersing the bearing industry By August 1944 whenthe Allies ew an eight-hundred-plane raid against Schweinfurt half thefactory was elsewhere11 Having faced this barrage the Germans braggedat warrsquos end ldquoEs ist kein Geraet zurueck geblieben weil Waelzlagerfehltenrdquo (No equipment was left behind because bearings were lacking)American analysts ought to take the lesson to heart the authors of theStrategic Bombing Survey insisted ldquoeven in the case of a very concen-trated industry very heavy and continuous attack must be made sinceotherwise the enemy if he can survive the initial shock will be able totake successful countermeasuresrdquo12

These target categories airframes and bearings were supposed tohave choked the German war-making capacity Both after a frantic dis-persal lost the vulnerability that the Americans expected Consequentlystarting in spring 1944 Allied strategy broadened in large measurebecause by then they had air superiority over the entirety of GermanyPlanners began to plot two new ldquobottlenecksrdquo to squeeze shut First theoperations analysts began directing airplanes against the synthetic oilindustrymdashthat is oil produced with the massive coal deposits of the

Ruhr They hit the steel industry hard anddrove massive missions against chemicalplants By doing so they aimed simultane-ously to damage the German home economyand to cripple rolling armor at the front

While reporting successful ldquobottleneckrdquoattacks such as the campaign against oil thereport itself was in essence doing its ownreconstruction of the German economymdashand its authors did not hesitate to point outwhere the original planners had failed tofind a vulnerable point For example theylamented that the combined Allied air forceslet loose only 05 percent of their bomb loadon the electrical industry even though the

Galison | War against the Center 11

Opposite Bombs dropped on German bearing targetsSource USSBS

Left German crude steel production Source USSBS

Germans themselves (as Speer later asserted) were terried of an engulf-ing Allied drive against German generating stations Power plants wereconcentrated in a limited number of locations generators could notstockpile their electrical product and the Germans had a terrible timerepairing damaged power stations Perusing captured documents theStrategic Bombing Survey authors reported

The secret minutes of the central planning committee studyingthe power shortage make this weakness clear The difculties ofadding capacity the limitations of the so-called grid system therelationship of curtailment and shortage of electric energy to pro-duction losses in industry and their fears that their extreme vul-nerability would be discovered are all paraded openly in theseminutes made by the Germans in the midst of the war13

Hitting forty-ve plants would have been dangerous for Germany as awholemdasha result they justified by testimony from Speer himself Andthese plants unlike much else could not be dispersed Similarly ldquoamajor opportunity in the Allied air offensive against oil was unexploitedrdquoin that the production of ethyl uid was crucial for aviation fuel andethyl uid required tertraethyl lead There were only two tetraethyl leadplants in Germany These the report insisted should have been hit14

Or again ldquoconcentration on the few synthetic rubber plants as a primarybombing target early in the war would have proven protablerdquo15

Again and again the bomb analysts repeated their message Aerialwarfare worked when it hit concentrated centralized production stand-ing at a functional node upstream of many other industries Bombingfailed when the Germans effectively dispersed their factories Separa-tion in space worked exceedingly well in other sectors Beginning in1934 the Nazis had already scattered their explosive and propellantplants but only in 1944 had they launched (rather unsuccessful)attempts to decentralize plants producing nitrogen (needed for gun-powder) and methanol (crucial for high explosives)16 Similarly Speerand his most valued lieutenant Edmund Geilenberg scrambled des-perately in the nal months of the war to disperse J-2 jet fuel for theirlast-ditch attempt to stem air losses with their new wonder weaponthe jet ghter

2 The Bombsight MirrorWhile they were assessing the air war against Nazi Germany theStrategic Bombing Survey analysts had under way a massive inquiryinto the assault on Japan Without reviewing the bulk of their study ofconventional bombing I want to turn to the report they led on the atomicattacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki That text chronicles the horrific

12 Grey Room 04

effects of the blast separately and methodically outlining its effect onbuildings and bodies by pressure heat and radiation Taking the testi-mony of hundreds of survivors the analysts asked about morale inquiredabout feelings of rebellion toward the government about attitudestoward the United States The bomb surveyors even if briey exploredthe effect of the nuclear devastation on internal high-level Japanesedeliberations about the future of the war

Suddenly in the concluding section of the report the authors took adifferent tack and the tone changed Gone was the absolute distancethe surveyors had managed to maintain toward industrial targets citiesand military objectives All at once the weapons dropped on an enemyjust months before began to appear in an inverted vision in which thosesame weapons appeared turned against the United States

The Surveyrsquos investigators as they proceeded about their studyfound an insistent question framing itself in their minds ldquoWhat ifthe target for the bomb had been an American cityrdquo True the pri-mary mission of the Survey was to ascertain the facts just sum-marized But conclusions as to the meaning of those facts forcitizens of the United States forced themselves almost inescapablyon the men who examined thoughtfully the remains of Hiroshimaand Nagasaki17

Sifting the rubble interviewing the wounded survivors the BombingSurvey investigators began to see similarities between Japanese build-ings and American ones between surviving structures at Hiroshimaand possible shelters in the United States They made it clear in printthat they thought the two nuclear-devastated sites were the best argu-ment against war itself but they also began to speculate on howAmericans might survive the kinds of attacks they themselves had justvisited on the Japanese

The fate of industries in both cities again illustrates the value ofdecentralization All major factories in Hiroshima were on theperiphery of the citymdashand escaped serious damage at Nagasakiplants and dockyards at the southern end of the city were merelyintact but those in the valley where the bomb exploded wereseriously damaged18

Medical facilities typically located in the central parts of the cities lay in smoldering ruins So it had been in Hamburg where survivors of theraids had lain in shock without assistance in their hours of greatest need

Looking at Hiroshima Nagasaki and Hamburg Survey personnelbegan to see their own large cities Already in 1946 they pressed for adramatic shift in the way those cities were conceived

Galison | War against the Center 13

The similar peril of American cities and the extent to which wisezoning has diminished it differ from city to city Though a reshap-ing and partial dispersal of the national centers of activity aredrastic and difcult measures they represent a social and mili-tary ideal toward which very practical steps can be taken once thepolicy has been laid down19

Efforts toward decentralization remained desultory during 1947But already Congress had ordered the National Security ResourcesBoard to begin exploring industrial relocation Abruptly in the sum-mer of 1949 the laissez-faire mood ended For it was in August that theRussians detonated their rst atomic bomb named by the West Joe 1Despite nearly four years of warning that the Russians would probablyhave nuclear weapons within five years of the Trinity test Americanpolicy experts politicians military officers and atomic scientistsreacted with an alarm bordering on panic Called to offer a response tothe Russian bomb in October 1949 the General Advisory Committee(GAC) under J Robert Oppenheimer convened only to harden theirresistance to further escalation of the arms race In a surprising andunanimous vote the GAC recommended against building the hydrogenbomb on moral grounds A weapon of genocide they asserted an ldquoevilunder lightrdquo It was that anti-H-bomb decision soon ratied by the AtomicEnergy Commissioners that sent a ssure straight down the center of acommunity of scientists grown close-knit during the war

The GACrsquos H-bomb report catalyzed a swift hard struggle betweenopponents and proponents of this new category of weapon Lobbyingbegan in secretmdashand then burst into the public arena after a congressionalleak Editorials in newspapers magazines and television erupted onboth sides with debate continuing all the way up to President Harry S Trumanrsquos decision in January 1950 The country would in fact buildthe hydrogen bomb In June 1950 the Korean War beganmdashmobilizationindustrial and military heightened as never before and the govern-ment inaugurated a still-continuing national commitment to a hugemilitary establishment

It was in this context that in August 1951 the president announceda national policy for industrial dispersion and the National SecurityResources Board quickly followed with a booklet entitled Is Your Planta Target that proclaimed ldquoThe risk of an all-out atomic attack on theUnited States grows greater each day since we are no longer the solepossessor of the secret of the atomic bomb This means that no indus-trial area in the Nation can be considered safe from attackrdquo20 To guar-antee survival the National Security Resources Board insisted wouldrequire that productive capacity be protected ldquoThe dispersion (or

14 Grey Room 04

Site selection for securitySource Industrial DispersionNational Security ResourcesBoard Is Your Plant a Target(Washington DC US Govern-ment Printing Of ce 1951)

deployment in space) of new plant development for war-supportingindustries can make American production less vulnerable to attackrdquoSpace could protect men at the battleeld the authors continued andspace by multiplying targets would diminish ldquothe vulnerability of anyone concentrationrdquo

Behind this national program lay four principles First the disper-sion would be of new industries rather than old second ldquono region ofthe country is to be built up at the expense of anotherrdquo third the dis-persion would take place within so-called ldquomarketing areasrdquo and fourthstate and local governments with private industry would initiate thechange and the federal government would encourage and providetechnical guidance

To tempt industrialists the Feds advertised additional benets thatwould accrue to those industries that dispersed better working andliving conditions for workers greater production by avoiding urbancongestion a healthier more stable economy Adding further quitematerial sweeteners to the mix the federal government promised toallocate ldquocerticates of necessityrdquo critical materials emergency loansand defense contracts to those industries that escaped the connes ofurban concentration Reading the booklet the industrialist and thecivic leader could begin asking themselves these questions

The handy cow pasture on the edge of town may look like a goodsite but does it measure up to the all-important security stan-dards Is it strategically located in relation to labor supply fueltransportation and other requirements for efcient and econom-

Galison | War against the Center 15

ical production Is the site properly located in relation to futurehomes shops schools and other community developments Hasfull consideration been given to efcient wartime productionand long-term benets to industry and community When youhave answered these questions you are on the way to developinga sound industrial dispersion program21

Industrialists swarmed toward Washington to assess the new plansGathered under the auspices of the Executive Ofce of the President

the National Security Resources Board assembled the key players on 7September 1951 in the Executive Ofce Building in Washington DC

Jack Small chairman of the Munitions Board told the assembledthat he was more scared now than when he came down to Washingtonsome nine months earlier

In the intervening time that God has given us we have madeprogress in the production of weapons getting new weaponsmade and creating a force strength but we are not yet ready andwe are in really desperate danger in the event that our enemyattacks For Godrsquos sake donrsquot get the idea that this thing isover or that the danger has nished or that these fanatic enemiesof ours have changed their plans or objectives one iota Theyhave not We will have achieved by next year a posture ofmore strength but still it will not be enough strength to pre-vent aggression

The ldquoall-outrdquo could come at any moment Small insisted to the indus-trialists and it could come by intention or by accident There was onlyone hope ldquoSpace is the one thing that really worksrdquo22

Soon however the discussion turned away from plutonium andtoward prots How queried the representatives from Alabama andLouisiana might this dispersion bring industry to their areas and awayfrom the Northeast which already had such access to the federal silverspoon Industrialists wondered aloud how much federal force-feedingthere would be and the ofcials reassured them that they intended inno way to damage business interests lower productivity or threaten a lossof labor supply This was to be dispersion within a marketing areamdashnot wholesale relocation to distant states

Small and his colleagues in dispersion left the audience withsomewhat vague injunctions But the national policy did vastly moreit aimed to make citizens of every community into target analysts oftheir own region As the Bureau of Commerce patiently explainedldquomaterials and methods for identifying the potential target areas aredescribed on the following pagesrdquo23 Those ldquopotential target areasrdquo

16 Grey Room 04

were the cities and towns of the United States Here is how the Commerce Department directed every community

but especially the top 168 metropolitan areas to proceed First checkthe list of industrial classifications and identify all those plantsemploying more than one hundred workers per peak shift These ranfrom industrial inorganic chemicals coke and byproducts to steelmills engines aircraft scientific instruments photographic equip-ment and ordnance Then identify those locations on a map (naturallynot disclosing the precise role of any single plant to unwanted eyes)Combine this information with outlines of heavily populated sectionsfollowing the information of the Census Bureau Lay out two largemaps (one inch equals one mile) showing political subdivisions arterialhighways railroads ports and harbors alongside industrial areas Nextdraw a series of four-inch (four-mile) circles on transparent overlaysmdashthese correspond to the area destroyed by an atomic bomb

Now you are ready to identify your regionrsquos target zones ldquothose areasthat contain sufcient concentrations of industry or population so asto constitute attractive atom-bomb targetsrdquo24 Just ldquoattractive atom-bombtargetsrdquo not sites ldquolikely to be targeted by the Russiansrdquomdashthe reifiedshorthand compresses all those years of wartime and then postwar tar-geting Your goal in what follows is to use these circles to form a targetout of the city as a whole by transecting the four-mile-diameter circlesonce they are judiciously located In particular the full target will contain both valuable defense-related industries (employing 16000workers in toto) or a residential population of 200000 people

Here is the schematic procedureThis region outlined by the dark line encloses the ldquohighly indus-

trialized sectionrdquo as defined by the National Industrial DispersionProgram Next each community is to plot the census tracts on the sec-ond set of working maps At the center of each tract goes a dot and thepopulation Again you overlay a four-mile transparent circle movingit until it circles a population of 200000 When you connect the centersof these 200000-person circles you have formed a ldquodensely populatedsectionrdquo Next join the two maps in such a way as to form a combinedarea embracing the high density of regions of both industry and popu-lation This joint region the Commerce Department declared wouldbe known as a potential A-bomb target zone From that zone measureten inches (ten miles) out to form the dispersal limit line There is yourgoal Locate all future critical industry and its associated populationspast the line of safety taking care not to create inadvertently a secondarypotential A-bomb target zone

These maps were not designed just to scare they would form witha factory proposal an application for a ldquocerticate of necessityrdquo (granting

Galison | War against the Center 17

18 Grey Room 04

Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo

Boundary of highly industrial ized section

Census-tract population centers with population gures

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of highly industrialized section

Galison | War against the Center 19

Top row left to right Self-targeting step I Take the listof government designated defense-related industries and plot theirlocation and employment This isthe rst task towards the construc-tion of areas known as the highlyindustrialized sections Source USDepartment of Commerce Indus-trial Dispersion Guidebook forCommunities Domestic CommerceSeries no 31 (Washington DCUS Government Printing Of ce1952)

Self-targeting step II To completethe construction of the perimeterof the highly industrialized sectionsdraw circles of four-mile radiusconnect centers of circles contain-ing more than 16000 workersSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step III Label populations from census tractsSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Bottom row left to right Self-targeting step IV To completethe construction of the denselypopulated sections draw circles offour-mile radius and connect thecenters of circles with more than200000 inhabitants SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Self-targeting step V Now super-impose the highly industrializedarea on the densely populatedarea Taken together they form the potential A-bomb Target zoneSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step VI Drawingthe potential A-bomb target zoneon a regional map planners shouldnow construct a safety margin often miles from the outside of theendangered area All new industrialplants should be dispersed out-side this ten-mile radius SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Census-tract population centers with population gures

accelerated tax amortization) facilitating the approval of defense loansand securing defense contracts

Bombing the Axis economy and dispersing the American one werereflections of one another When Charles E Wilson director of theOffice of Defense Mobilization came before the National SecurityResources Board of the Presidentrsquos Executive Office he needed anexpert on how to disperse industry To the captains of industry assem-bled for a 1951 hearing Wilson sought to justify his strictures aboutsplitting plants by ten or twenty miles ldquoMr Gorrie brought me a realexpert on that I call him a real expert because he was one of the menwho had done bombing in the industrial arena of Germany and cer-tainly he convinced me that 10 or 20 miles provides reasonable safetyrdquo25

Bombers braced for bombsIn 1952 Project East River (Associated Universities contracted to the

federal government) reported on how Washington could drive indus-try outside the expanding urban areas ldquoleapfroggingrdquo away from urbancores One role was to create ldquopublic understandingrdquo of the need forldquosatellite townrdquo planning and its defense use More materially theEast River gang reported the federal government should provide aidto assist in the construction of urban arteries to the satellite towns pro-vide rent subsidies to small businesses send appropriations to matchmetropolitan planning units offer tax assistance for new constructionin outlying areas demand dispersal to qualify for federal defenseinsurance and promote federal loans and grants for the constructionof outlying schools streets water and sewers The government shouldsubsidize ring roads around citiesmdashlike Route 128 around Bostonmdashand strive to locate defense industry on it Above all the fast-increas-ing population ofce building and industry heading into cities had tobe reversed Throughout constant vigilance against the re-creation ofnew centers26

Eponymously the report took as its ldquoarea studyrdquo the imagined caseof a Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapon detonated several thousand feetabove a 260-acre rectangle in Manhattan adjacent to the East RiverWith detailed information about the age structure and flammabilityof individual buildingsmdashand recent census datamdashthis not-so-typicalpiece of America could then be tracked as it shattered and burnedunder the assault of nuclear attack How many of the 35000 peopleresiding between 59th and 72nd Streets (between 3rd Avenue and theriver) would become casualties if a weapon were to be exploded at 2 AM How many minutesrsquo warning would they have to take shelterHow much radiation would they receive Would a firestorm eruptBased principally on the results of the US Strategic Bombing Surveyon Hiroshima and Nagasaki this report was in a sense a dully terrifying

20 Grey Room 04

answer to the question the Bombing Survey had posed seven years earlier What would the bombs that were let loose over Hiroshima havelooked like were they to have been dropped back home27

Under the guidance of these various boards and the lucrative drawof taxes loans and contracts one by one key industrial and civic leaderslearned to see themselves through the reflection of a bombsight Oneby one they began plotting their own dispersion In September 1955for example the Chemical and Engineering News reported on atomicvulnerability in the chemical process industry Nuclear weapons jetairplanes and the concept of total war combined wrote Neil P HurleySJ to blur the distinction between military force and industrial poten-tial The role of an industrymdashits functional interdependence on otherindustriesmdashxed the likelihood of its plants becoming targets Chemical-process industries were vulnerable on two fronts geographic concen-tration and functional criticality The conclusion was as inevitable asit was fearsome ldquoThree well-directed H-bombs on these key targetareas would have serious consequences for the industrial chemicalproducing complexrdquo28 Two-thirds of workers making industrial chem-icals lived in ten states

American chemical dispersion in 1955 was directly and explicitlylinked to German chemical dispersion in 1945 Over and over againHurley cited the Strategic Bombing Survey ldquoIt is worth noting thatantifriction bearings represented an Achilles heel in the German econ-omy in World War II The Strategic Bombing Survey indicated a paral-ysis of German industry following Allied air force bombings ofSchweinfurt where more than 50 of German antifriction bearingswere producedrdquo Four H-bombs for example could wipe out half the UScapacity to produce instruments and related products ldquoUnfortunatelythe US has many Schweinfurts In the Great Lakes region are to befound 47 of the nonelectrical machinery productionrdquo A saturationattack on that regionmdashand saturation would not take many bombsmdashwould Hurley noted destroy a vast array of industries including thatof chemicals29

Throughout the 1950s the Strategic Bombing Survey remained cen-tral to thinking about nuclear warfare and the dispersion of industryHurley for example in constructing his report on American chemicalpriorities reproduced the Surveyrsquos list of the ten most vital chemicalsfor the German war effort from nitrogen methanol and calcium car-bide down to caustic soda chlorine and sodium carbonate He reca-pitulated the Surveyrsquos conclusions about the shortages of nitric acid onthe manufacture of explosives the reduction of methanol that cut intothe making of high explosives and the Germansrsquo vain last-ditch effortsto create underground factories In this new narrative Americans

Galison | War against the Center 21

played the role previously performed by Germans Russians took overthe bombing role from the Allies Those who had used their knowledgeof American industry had planned the strategic bombing of the Axisnow they became the potential bombing victims readying plans to disperse Here is Hurley

To avoid a repetition in this country of the unfortunate experi-ences of the Germans during World War II necessary moves mustbe made before any outbreak of hostilities The Germans enjoyedthe luxury of learning from their mistakes It is highly doubtfulwhether in the atomic age any nation will have the same oppor-tunitymdashone mistake may well be the last30

Dispersal could aid in reconstruction and also preventionmdasha strongernation ldquoprotected in spacerdquo (as the phrase went) would deter any attacker

Admiral Ben Moreell retired from the Navy and in the mid-1950schairman of Jones amp Laughlin Steel Corporation had just presented tothe secretary of commerce the manifesto of the purposes of the Ironand Steel Advisory Council The council had urged a mobilization planfor steel in light of the threat presented by high-speed jet airplaneslong-range missiles and nuclear weapons that ldquoour prospectiveenemyrdquo might at any time hurl without warning Big steel needed acomplete control center one linked by telegraph and radio to the steel-making plants Admiral Moreell and his fellow advisers emphasizedthe proximate danger of Russians with H-bombs and in fact asMoreell noted they had one just a few days after his committee laid itsreport at Commerce Worriedly the admiral allowed that 75 percent ofAmerican steelmaking capacity could be destroyed by a mere tenhydrogen bombs The councilrsquos recommendation disperse 25 percentof the capacity in such a way that the resulting plants would be splitup into numerous single-function plants providing each plant with atleast three alternative modes for transporting its products It was timeMoreell intoned to take similar measures in a host of other industriesincluding rubber copper glass aluminum textiles automobiles andelectrical products Prepare for real costs for steel alone the disper-sion bill would run to some $10 billion

Moreell ldquoPerhaps I have overemphasized the hazard under whichwe now live I do not believe so The facts which are coming out withrespect to the tactics and policies of the Communist enemy in Chinaand Korea added to what we already know about them justify the con-clusion that we are facing a ruthless adversary who will permit nohumane consideration to inuence his decisions who will strike with-out prior warning and whose ambition is to rule the worldrdquo31

Dispersion might help the admiral concluded Like so much of this lit-

22 Grey Room 04

Opposite top Where the steelindustry is concentrated Source Admiral Ben MoreellldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do toUS Industriesrdquo US News andWorld Report 7 May 1954

Opposite bottom Destroyingsteel Source Moreell ldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do to USIndustriesrdquo

erature issues of protability and patriotism stood side by side and heconcluded under the ag gesturing to the Founding Father ldquoIn timeof peace prepare for warrdquo

Preparations advanced In 1956 Industrial Development a nationalmagazine dedicated to ldquoarea analysis and business site selectionrdquoreported that the Ofce of Area Development had reviewed and approvedsome fty-eight of the self-prepared urban area surveys Money talkedBy mid-June 1955 projects valued at $30 billion had qualied for taxabatements under the program

Take Milwaukee In December 1953 the cityrsquos mayor Frank Zeidlertraveled to the White House where the president addressed some twohundred large-city mayors in stark terms ldquoFor the rst time in historycities have become principal targets for an enemy seeking to conquerour nation The city has moved from a position of support in the rear Ithas moved out into the front linerdquo Immediately Zeidler arrangedto meet with the Wisconsin governor and the mayors of RacineMadison and Green Joining the chorus of civil defense authorities themayors agreed that in the short term they would need plans for rapidevacuation in the event of a nuclear attack at the same time theyneeded to begin longer-term planning for the dispersal of the city By

Galison | War against the Center 23

May 1954 Milwaukee had its report ldquoNew building in the core of anurban target [ought to] be prohibited except when it replaces existingstructures This is intended to halt the pouring of greater target valuesinto areas which are already richly rewarding as targetsrdquo Spreadingindustry wasnrsquot all that the report advocated The new region wouldneed new school districts novel tax structures and alternative typesof local governments Zoning would force dispersal from the centerinstitute bands of open space and deliver industrial plants to hinter-lands deliberately bypassed by major radial or circumferential roads inorder to avoid creating secondary concentrations ldquoThere is little doubtrdquothe reportrsquos author reckoned ldquothat some of [these] measures wouldhave to be fought through the Supreme Court before they were acceptedby allrdquo32 Pressed by national codes taxes defense spending andimprecations by the president on down local and federal authoritiescompeted to outdo the other in the rush away from the targeted center

America was not alone in declaring war on the urban center Canadain the midst of a major effort to plan urban growth in 1956 also begandefensive dispersal The Ofce of the Civil Defence Coordinator in col-laboration with the Defence Research Board and McGill Universityprepared a Guide to Urban Dispersal ldquoDispersal is the characteristicof present day urban growthrdquo the authors asserted Satellite towns andvillages made urban regions the right scale on which to re-think pat-terns of communication government and demography ldquoDefence iscritical In modern warfare the initial blow is struck at the civilian pop-ulation to destroy at a stroke the ability to resist The greatest vulnera-bility lies in urban concentrationmdashthe greatest security would beachieved by urban dispersalrdquo That dispersal would follow a survey ofa ring located an H-bomb radius away from the regional center That is

24 Grey Room 04

where the Guide came in Based in part on a real area and in part ongeneric characteristics the book was a how-to manual for planning thescattering of the urban into the regional Slope of the land location ofwater avenues of communication and transport needs all had to bereckoned The Guide instructed local leaders and planners how to dia-gram all this for their future Satellite towns would perch outside thering of safetymdashtowns that under no circumstances ought to attractmore than forty thousand inhabitants Ultimately government-pro-pelled ldquourban regionsrdquo would replace the ldquoamorphous formrdquo of currentmetropolitan development alleviating social and economic problemswhile securing spatial defense against thermonuclear attack33 City bycity country by country the bomb helped drive dispersion Indeedcoming full circle the Germans already all too familiar with aerialbombardment began preparing for a rain of hydrogen bombsHannover Bremen and Duumlsseldorf issued the rst three analyses andothers would follow Their comprehensive treatments covered the sta-tus of police re hospital postal service and road service followinga nuclear attack34

Preparation for atomic war was certainly on President Dwight DEisenhowerrsquos mind as he strove to resuscitate the long-debated federalhighway system Franklin D Roosevelt had pushed the idea in the1930s not least for its promise of providing jobs Reports rolled in TheBureau of Public Roads undertook one in 1938 and the chairman ofthat organization presided over another called Interregional Highwaysdated 1943 Other reports and standards marched on through the warwith some actually leading to road buildingmdashin 1947 crews began cut-ting the rst miles of interstate highways Still by the time Eisenhowercame into office in January 1953 there were but six thousand or somiles of road improvements actually on the ground (at a cost of nearly$1 billion)

Eisenhower liked highways He had struggled across the country ina motorized convoy back in 1919 an unpleasant sixty-two days of slip-ping on ice sticking in mud breaking into wooden bridges and freez-ing under snow The contrast with Germany was stark As SupremeCommander General Eisenhower had been astonished by the auto-bahns taking particular note of the advantages that road system affordedas he had to move masses of men and mateacuteriel across the conqueredReich ldquoGermany made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons acrossthe landrdquo On July 12 1954 Vice President Richard Nixon facing theconference of state governors at Lake George New York read fromEisenhowerrsquos prepared speech and the message was clear The obso-lete network had to go its antiquated byways were clogging the roadsand courts while leaving a death toll on the citizenry comparable to

Galison | War against the Center 25

Industrial dispersal 1956 Solidcircles show cities where dispersalplans were approved by late 1955dotted circles indicate communi-ties where plans were under prepa-ration Source Theodore K PasmaldquoIndustrial Dispersal 1956rdquo Indus-trial Development The NationalMagazine of Area Analysis andBusiness Site Selection (January-February 1956)

ldquoa bloody warrdquo But Eisenhowerrsquos final jab at the current system wasstark holding up for public contemplation its ldquoappalling inadequaciesto meet the demands of catastrophe or defense should an atomic warcomerdquo35 Radial roads would afford clear routes for city evacuationCircumferential roads Project East River had recommended back in1952 should be encouraged wherever possible to drain industry andpopulation from the dense city centers36 In fact highway designersconsulted with federal civil defense agencies and military plannersaimed for interstate highways that would bypass urban areas to avoidldquoroute[s] that had suffered a direct A-bomb hitrdquo37 It took two years ofpolitical wrangling and it goes without saying that economic housingand non-nuclear forces for the interstate were surely among its powerfulmotors By the end of 1956 the Interstate and Defense Highway Systemhad fundingmdashsome $25 billion of federal support38

3 Distributed KnowledgeBy 1960 the Air Force began dreaming worse nightmares than nuke-ladenbombers bullying their way past ghter defense Atomic strikes againstthe continental United States could be launched with missiles forwhich range of ight was no longer an issue The RAND Corporationmade its mark with contracts to think about this thermonuclear threatfrom the new think tank issued shelves of studies including thefamous (and famously parodied) volume by Herman Kahn On Thermo-nuclear War Just as Kahn stepped into the limelight the much lesswell known Paul Baran an electrical engineer coming from HughesAircraft Companyrsquos systems group joined RAND His job was todevelop a scheme that would ensure the survival of the US telecom-munications infrastructure through a Russian rst strikemdasha vital linknot only for domestic communication but also for command and con-trol His response in a series of papers launched in 1960 was a plan toremove completely critical nodes from the telephone system Like thethree highways many wanted from each dispersed defense plantBaranrsquos vision aimed for safety in redundantly connected spatially dis-tributed mini-centers

Here is how Baran put it in one of his rst papers

The cloud-of-doom attitude that nuclear war spells the end of theearth is slowly lifting from the minds of the many Better quanti-tative estimates of post-attack destruction together with a lessemotional discussion of the alternatives may mark the end of theldquowhat the hellmdashwhatrsquos the userdquo era A new view emerges the pos-sibility of a war exists but there is much that can be done to min-imize the consequences

26 Grey Room 04

De nition of redundancy Paul Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunications I Introductionto Distributed CommunicationsNetworkrdquo RAND Corporationmemorandum RM-3420-PRAugust 1964

Survivable atomic warmdashthe goal of the fteen-year struggle since theSurvey crew picked through the still radioactive rubble at HiroshimaBaran again

If war does not mean the end of the earth in a black and whitemanner then it follows that we should do those things that makethe shade of gray as light as possible to plan now to minimizepotential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permitthe survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstructthe economy swiftly39

That reconstruction demanded the elimination of the hierarchical center alternately referred to over these rst decades of the cold war asthe linchpin the bottleneck and the node

The problem as Baran formulated it did involve new equipment tolabel digitally each packet of information with a ldquotordquo and ldquofromrdquo andthen to route these fragments over diverse paths toward their eventualreassembly on arrival But before anything could be built moved dig-itized or reinforced the conceptual problem required attention Thatreconceptualization now took as it had not before a mathematicalform If nodes were replaced with redundant links how could heexploit the information-theoretic approach of Claude Shannon to countthe surviving paths between points in the array

Here is how Baran reasoned

Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network whichwill allow several hundred major communications stations to talkwith one another after an enemy attack As a criterion of surviv-ability we elect to use the percentage of stations both survivingthe physical attack and remaining in electrical connection withthe largest single group of surviving stations This criterion ischosen as a conservative measure of the ability of the survivingstations to operate together as a coherent entity after the attack40

With the result that a redundancy of at least R = 3would ensure a likely survival rate of nearly 75 percentBaran could now sketch the distributed system thatwould vouchsafe communication after nuclear war

Worst obviously was the centralized node that rep-resented the single critical target This was the situationwith concentrated steel electricity or oil plants it wasthe structure of the hubbed railway system It was inshort the bombing plannerrsquos dream and the bombingvictimrsquos nightmare Decentralized nodes that main-tained a local hierarchical structure were clearly better

Galison | War against the Center 27

a complete grid structure was best of all To a certain extent such gridsstood for the defensive ideal of dispersion more generally By increasingthe number of targets one decreased the likelihood of incapacitationHalting abortive and awkward though it was Baranrsquos scheme (alongwith a similar one developed in England) slowly wended its way throughdifferent incarnations in the ARPANET and Milnet But the elusivegoal all through these decades of distributed communication was a dis-tributed grid or mesh a thrust in the rst instance aimed at removingthe critical node Though in the garb of nuclear survivability the gridmay not appear as the redemptive Internet of our dreams that tech-nology grew directly out of fifteen years of longing for a world stillstanding after thermonuclear war41

4 We Are Become TargetsDuring the years of World War II American and British planners andanalysts learned to see through a bombsight Not in a single glimpsebut in the routine killings and losses that accompanied ever more fre-quently repeated raids Twenty-four hours a day day after day monthafter month year after year the planners and analysts studied andrestudied the interdependencies of the German economy circled tar-gets blasted factories leveled cities analyzed the damage and struckagain Chemicals nitric acid methanol Basic materials rubber steeloil aviation gas Transport systems electrical generators And popula-tion centers area bombing by the combined American and Britishforces killed some 600000 Germans In a war that the Nazis renderedever more vicious even as their defeat seemed inevitable the Americansrsquoearly dreams of precision bombing went by the way Two hundredplanes over Schweinfurt then four hundred but also Hamburg LuumlbeckMuumlnster Berlin Dresden Regensburg year after year Measuring bombloads accuracies reconstruction time 35 ton of bombs per acre toinduce damage of 8 percent delay time for reconstruction two and a

28 Grey Room 04

half months A calculus of fractions probabilities delaysBy the warrsquos end a new category of analyst had come into existence

more often than not social scientists and industrialists but also human-ists diplomats mathematicians and natural scientists Piecing togetherfragments of intelligence examining reconnaissance photographs theypainted an elaborate portrait of a wartime foe By warrsquos end the Surveyanalysts had come to see German and Japanese cities through what onemight call a ldquodestructive functionalismrdquo dependencies leading back-ward they kept hoping to the ever-elusive linchpin that when pulledwould topple the structure Schweinfurt was supposed to be one suchpoint with its all-important bearing factories And after Schweinfurtthere were other ldquobottlenecksrdquo to be targeted other cities other plantsother transshipment points

Perhaps before Hiroshima the bombsight eye had already begun toreect back I donrsquot know But in the atomic rubble as the analysts inter-viewed hundreds of blast survivors and canvassed the broken struc-tures as they methodically noted which kinds of concrete walls stillstood at various radii of destruction they began quite explicitly to seethemselves to see America through the bombardierrsquos eye They beganto wonder what an American city would look like after the bomb hadfallen Returning to the United States and publishing their StrategicBombing Survey things began to look different They began to see them-selves their towns and factories on the crosshairs of radial targetingmaps Far from a technological determinism the all-too material tech-nologies and concepts of self were fully imbricated

One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics launched when NorbertWiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedbackmachine that could be mimicked electronically from there it was a shortstep to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way Then humanphysiology began to appear as a cybernetic system then the humanmind then life then even the world system as a whole42 Somewherein the midst of total war a technocratic vision of a technical EnemyOther rose to become a vision of ourselves It was but a heartbeat beforecybernetics saturated the writings of Gregory Bateson and MargaretMead not to speak of philosophers planners and architects

But the consequence was this Three years before the Russians hadthe bomb in fact before on just about anyonersquos account the cold warhad begun American analysts were already advocating a massive dis-persion of factories and populations against atomic aerial attack

As the cold war arms race accelerated the search for ldquodefense in spacerdquogrew more desperate jet bombers atomic bombs hydrogen bombsintercontinental ballistic missiles With each step more frantic urgingto spread the cities into their ldquomarketing areasrdquo Highway systems

Galison | War against the Center 29

Centralized decentralized and distributed networksSource Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

War against the CenterPETER GALISON

1 DispersionIn the 1980s we learned to view postmodernist architecture as a formof de-centering a dispersion of form and function away from the criti-cal node For half a century the Empire State Building had stood formodernism pinpointing not only the symbolic dead center of NewYork City but even focusing its own central axis around its needlelikeantenna When postmodern theorists like Fredric Jameson sought tocontest that centripetal force of modernism they gestured to the WestinBonaventure Hotel with its repetitious cylindrical structures iteratingelevators and escalators so numbingly that visitors wandered disori-ented unable to nd the same place twice For David Harvey and otherlate-twentieth-century theorists of urban design the postmodern cele-brated ldquodispersed decentralized and deconcentrated urban formsrdquo thathad become ldquotechnically possiblerdquo only in the previous decade Themodernist trope of concentration became that postmodernist dispersalcohesion shifted to fragmentation and metropolis to counterurban-ization1 A city-world more like William Gibsonrsquos Sprawl seemed inthe ofng for the early twenty-rst century rather than the compact starof Walter Benjaminrsquos Paris radiating from its heart capital of the nine-teenth century Our vision of the late twentieth century an urban geog-raphy of Deleuzian rhizomes burrowing every which way withoutbeginning or endmdashno tracking back to an ultimate origin center orpeak no hierarchy in short an end to the modernist arboreal dreamorganizing all around a rooted center predicated on located cities cen-tered societies and integral psyches

Among the many meanings of postmodernism (historical quotationstylistic pastiche multiple coding depthless meaning) the removal ofhierarchy was crucial for the move toward counterurbanization easilyadapting itself to the 1990s salvational narrative in which the Internetstarred as postmodern democratic and liberatory (Even the briefestof Web searches yields hundreds of sites with titles like ldquoInternet =Postmodernismrdquo or ldquoThe Internet as Post-Modern Culturerdquo2) How didwe lurch from the centered modernism to this aesthetic architecturaleconomic and according to some metaphysical placelessness Lessclear For Harvey and Jameson the underlying transformation in thedisposition of buildings and cityscapes lay in the ever-widening gyrationsof multinational corporations the cultural logic as Jameson put it of

Grey Room 04 Summer 2001 pp 6ndash33 copy 2001 Grey Room Inc and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 7

late capitalism Others like Charles Jencks mapped the de-centering backto a cultural context of literary theory and philosophy More recentwork by Peter Rowe and others importantly attends to the remarkablejuxtaposition that has characterized suburban growthmdashon the one handpulling toward technical rational planning and on the other toward anarcadian imaginary3

Here I would like to point toward an architectural dispersion ratherless abstract than that celebrated by a generalized zeitgeist by a shift inan economic base ldquoreectedrdquo in the cultural superstructure by an epochalpostwar taste change toward suburban life or by an entropic ow awayfrom an ordered city core No doubt such intellectual pragmatic aestheticand stochastic drives did contribute to the pressure driving dense citycores outward But today I want to begin elsewhere Not in 1973 with theoil crisis and subsequent economic upheaval nor with the social upheavalsor deconstructivist literary-theoretical work of the 1960s Nor for thatmatter will I start with the Internet though I will come back to it

Instead I will address bombs the bombs of the long war that in acertain sense began in the 1930s accelerated after the Nazi seizureof power continued across the end of World War II through the coldwar and even past the fall of the Soviet Union into the present unset-tled moment But we need to step back two decades before the 1960s

As British and American planners began designing their strategiesfor the massive bombing campaign of the war the targeters joined theelite civilian sectors of law business academic social science and eco-nomics Together they composed the Army Air Forcersquos Committee ofOperations Analysts ldquoOperations analysisrdquo was essentially a methodi-cal theoretical reconstruction of the interconnections that held togetherthe German economy and war machine and that asked how it could beblown apart Where they asked were its nodal points the linchpinsthat when pulled would topple the economy forcing the Nazi warmachine to a halt Analyzing this whole processmdashthat is the effects ofthe bombing effortmdashwas the US Strategic Bombing Survey foundedin 1944 while Flying Fortresses were still leaving each day for Germantargets from the airelds of East Anglia The Survey was an immenseaffair employing well over a thousand people including as ldquodirec-torsrdquo specic mostly industrial experts on their topics For examplethe head of a major mining rm directed work on munitions the exec-utive vice president and general manager of Standard Oil directed thepetroleum division and a former vice president of the Curtiss-WrightCorporation ran the Aircraft Division Appropriately enough FranklindrsquoOlier president of Prudential Insurance ran the whole of the Surveymdashthe greatest damage-assessment program in history Among the majorgures running other divisions were John Kenneth Galbraith (overall

8 Grey Room 04

Organization chart US StrategicBombing Survey (USSBS)Source US Strategic BombingSurvey Overall Report (EuropeanWar) 30 September 1945reprinted with an introduction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976)

economic effects) George Ball (transportation) and Paul Nitze (equipmentand utilities)4 Starting on the lower rungs of the ladder were Marxisteconomist Paul Baran and poet W H Auden5

One of the rst targets was the Luftwaffe itself a task in destructionthat the Army Air Force aimed to complete by pulverizing airframe fac-tories This proved vastly more difcult than the Allies expected Afterdismissing the Versailles agreement forbidding the construction of airpower the Nazi regime hammered into place a German air forceproofed as far as possible against enemy attack Emphasizing protec-tion for their factories against air raids the Luftwaffe planners sited newplants away from frontiers in suburban or country districts concealingstructures deploying camouage separating buildings within the plantsand providing on-site air raid shelters for workers The Reich pooledpatents and structured the airframe ldquocomplexrdquo so that spatially separatedplants could stamp out replaceable segments of their completed prod-uct It was an efcient powerful apparatus that as the Survey promptlyconceded continued to produce an abundance of ghters and bomberseven under the years-long rain of explosives6

Responding to some fourteen attacks on the German aircraft industrybetween July and December 1943 the Germans dispersed their facto-ries as rapidly as they could For example initial American and Britishattacks against the Focke-Wulf plant at Bremen and the Heinkel plant atRostock were not very successful worse for the Allies the bomb runsled the German authorities to splinter Focke-Wulf production from the heartland in Bremen into East Prussia and Poland Not only did this dispersal open new forced labor supplies to the Nazis but it would also the Germans believed put the plants out of harmrsquos rangeLarge-scale dispersion began during the Allied assault of the secondhalf of 1943 and compulsory dispersion took hold in February 19447

Galison | War against the Center 9

To realize these goals Albert Speerrsquos assistant Karl-Otto Saur createda vast ldquoghter staffrdquo from which one member was dispatched perma-nently to every airframe factory in the Reich even as the fighter staffpartitioned the factories into hundreds of sites many of which stood inforest clearings8 Acknowledging the success of the dispersal programthe Strategic Bombing Survey allowed that Nazi airframe productionactually increased during 1944 They concluded that Germany lostcontrol of the air not by a lack of planes but by the shortage of well-trained pilots and aviation fuel

But the operations analysts selecting targets were not just after par-ticular pieces of munitions factories their goal was to precipitate a col-lapse of the German economy as a whole To that end they directed aseries of studies designed to locate just those plants where destructionwould cause shortages to ripple through the entire system Operationsfollowed Henry ldquoHaprdquo Arnold for example tempted Harry Hopkinswith the notion that blasting the German ball bearing industry ldquowouldprobably wreck all German industryrdquo9

At the top of the Alliesrsquo bombing priority list stood ball bearingswithout which they reckoned German machinery would quite literallygrind to a halt As the authors of the Strategic Bombing Survey put it

On the afternoon of the 17th of August 1943 some 200 FlyingFortresses flying from their bases in England deep into Bavariaand unescorted after reaching the German border struck the rstgreat blow aimed at the complete destruction of an entire andessential segment of the German war economy10

Some 52 percent of German bearing production lay in an enormousfactory complex at Schweinfurt US Army Air Force planes hit the

10 Grey Room 04

city with some four hundred tons of bombs while the Germans struckdown thirty-six of the attackers The raids continued with some eleventhousand tons of bombs dropped the most destructive of which tookplace on 14 October 1943 Again over two hundred planes descendedon the plant letting loose 450 tons of high explosives and incendiariesdestroying 10 percent of the machinery 20 percent of the stock and350000 square feet of plant German antindashaircraft batteries and ghtersshot down an even greater number of planes than on the earlier bigraid killing some six hundred airmen As a direct result of that attackSpeer near panic put his closest associate Philip Kessler in charge ofprotecting and dispersing the bearing industry By August 1944 whenthe Allies ew an eight-hundred-plane raid against Schweinfurt half thefactory was elsewhere11 Having faced this barrage the Germans braggedat warrsquos end ldquoEs ist kein Geraet zurueck geblieben weil Waelzlagerfehltenrdquo (No equipment was left behind because bearings were lacking)American analysts ought to take the lesson to heart the authors of theStrategic Bombing Survey insisted ldquoeven in the case of a very concen-trated industry very heavy and continuous attack must be made sinceotherwise the enemy if he can survive the initial shock will be able totake successful countermeasuresrdquo12

These target categories airframes and bearings were supposed tohave choked the German war-making capacity Both after a frantic dis-persal lost the vulnerability that the Americans expected Consequentlystarting in spring 1944 Allied strategy broadened in large measurebecause by then they had air superiority over the entirety of GermanyPlanners began to plot two new ldquobottlenecksrdquo to squeeze shut First theoperations analysts began directing airplanes against the synthetic oilindustrymdashthat is oil produced with the massive coal deposits of the

Ruhr They hit the steel industry hard anddrove massive missions against chemicalplants By doing so they aimed simultane-ously to damage the German home economyand to cripple rolling armor at the front

While reporting successful ldquobottleneckrdquoattacks such as the campaign against oil thereport itself was in essence doing its ownreconstruction of the German economymdashand its authors did not hesitate to point outwhere the original planners had failed tofind a vulnerable point For example theylamented that the combined Allied air forceslet loose only 05 percent of their bomb loadon the electrical industry even though the

Galison | War against the Center 11

Opposite Bombs dropped on German bearing targetsSource USSBS

Left German crude steel production Source USSBS

Germans themselves (as Speer later asserted) were terried of an engulf-ing Allied drive against German generating stations Power plants wereconcentrated in a limited number of locations generators could notstockpile their electrical product and the Germans had a terrible timerepairing damaged power stations Perusing captured documents theStrategic Bombing Survey authors reported

The secret minutes of the central planning committee studyingthe power shortage make this weakness clear The difculties ofadding capacity the limitations of the so-called grid system therelationship of curtailment and shortage of electric energy to pro-duction losses in industry and their fears that their extreme vul-nerability would be discovered are all paraded openly in theseminutes made by the Germans in the midst of the war13

Hitting forty-ve plants would have been dangerous for Germany as awholemdasha result they justified by testimony from Speer himself Andthese plants unlike much else could not be dispersed Similarly ldquoamajor opportunity in the Allied air offensive against oil was unexploitedrdquoin that the production of ethyl uid was crucial for aviation fuel andethyl uid required tertraethyl lead There were only two tetraethyl leadplants in Germany These the report insisted should have been hit14

Or again ldquoconcentration on the few synthetic rubber plants as a primarybombing target early in the war would have proven protablerdquo15

Again and again the bomb analysts repeated their message Aerialwarfare worked when it hit concentrated centralized production stand-ing at a functional node upstream of many other industries Bombingfailed when the Germans effectively dispersed their factories Separa-tion in space worked exceedingly well in other sectors Beginning in1934 the Nazis had already scattered their explosive and propellantplants but only in 1944 had they launched (rather unsuccessful)attempts to decentralize plants producing nitrogen (needed for gun-powder) and methanol (crucial for high explosives)16 Similarly Speerand his most valued lieutenant Edmund Geilenberg scrambled des-perately in the nal months of the war to disperse J-2 jet fuel for theirlast-ditch attempt to stem air losses with their new wonder weaponthe jet ghter

2 The Bombsight MirrorWhile they were assessing the air war against Nazi Germany theStrategic Bombing Survey analysts had under way a massive inquiryinto the assault on Japan Without reviewing the bulk of their study ofconventional bombing I want to turn to the report they led on the atomicattacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki That text chronicles the horrific

12 Grey Room 04

effects of the blast separately and methodically outlining its effect onbuildings and bodies by pressure heat and radiation Taking the testi-mony of hundreds of survivors the analysts asked about morale inquiredabout feelings of rebellion toward the government about attitudestoward the United States The bomb surveyors even if briey exploredthe effect of the nuclear devastation on internal high-level Japanesedeliberations about the future of the war

Suddenly in the concluding section of the report the authors took adifferent tack and the tone changed Gone was the absolute distancethe surveyors had managed to maintain toward industrial targets citiesand military objectives All at once the weapons dropped on an enemyjust months before began to appear in an inverted vision in which thosesame weapons appeared turned against the United States

The Surveyrsquos investigators as they proceeded about their studyfound an insistent question framing itself in their minds ldquoWhat ifthe target for the bomb had been an American cityrdquo True the pri-mary mission of the Survey was to ascertain the facts just sum-marized But conclusions as to the meaning of those facts forcitizens of the United States forced themselves almost inescapablyon the men who examined thoughtfully the remains of Hiroshimaand Nagasaki17

Sifting the rubble interviewing the wounded survivors the BombingSurvey investigators began to see similarities between Japanese build-ings and American ones between surviving structures at Hiroshimaand possible shelters in the United States They made it clear in printthat they thought the two nuclear-devastated sites were the best argu-ment against war itself but they also began to speculate on howAmericans might survive the kinds of attacks they themselves had justvisited on the Japanese

The fate of industries in both cities again illustrates the value ofdecentralization All major factories in Hiroshima were on theperiphery of the citymdashand escaped serious damage at Nagasakiplants and dockyards at the southern end of the city were merelyintact but those in the valley where the bomb exploded wereseriously damaged18

Medical facilities typically located in the central parts of the cities lay in smoldering ruins So it had been in Hamburg where survivors of theraids had lain in shock without assistance in their hours of greatest need

Looking at Hiroshima Nagasaki and Hamburg Survey personnelbegan to see their own large cities Already in 1946 they pressed for adramatic shift in the way those cities were conceived

Galison | War against the Center 13

The similar peril of American cities and the extent to which wisezoning has diminished it differ from city to city Though a reshap-ing and partial dispersal of the national centers of activity aredrastic and difcult measures they represent a social and mili-tary ideal toward which very practical steps can be taken once thepolicy has been laid down19

Efforts toward decentralization remained desultory during 1947But already Congress had ordered the National Security ResourcesBoard to begin exploring industrial relocation Abruptly in the sum-mer of 1949 the laissez-faire mood ended For it was in August that theRussians detonated their rst atomic bomb named by the West Joe 1Despite nearly four years of warning that the Russians would probablyhave nuclear weapons within five years of the Trinity test Americanpolicy experts politicians military officers and atomic scientistsreacted with an alarm bordering on panic Called to offer a response tothe Russian bomb in October 1949 the General Advisory Committee(GAC) under J Robert Oppenheimer convened only to harden theirresistance to further escalation of the arms race In a surprising andunanimous vote the GAC recommended against building the hydrogenbomb on moral grounds A weapon of genocide they asserted an ldquoevilunder lightrdquo It was that anti-H-bomb decision soon ratied by the AtomicEnergy Commissioners that sent a ssure straight down the center of acommunity of scientists grown close-knit during the war

The GACrsquos H-bomb report catalyzed a swift hard struggle betweenopponents and proponents of this new category of weapon Lobbyingbegan in secretmdashand then burst into the public arena after a congressionalleak Editorials in newspapers magazines and television erupted onboth sides with debate continuing all the way up to President Harry S Trumanrsquos decision in January 1950 The country would in fact buildthe hydrogen bomb In June 1950 the Korean War beganmdashmobilizationindustrial and military heightened as never before and the govern-ment inaugurated a still-continuing national commitment to a hugemilitary establishment

It was in this context that in August 1951 the president announceda national policy for industrial dispersion and the National SecurityResources Board quickly followed with a booklet entitled Is Your Planta Target that proclaimed ldquoThe risk of an all-out atomic attack on theUnited States grows greater each day since we are no longer the solepossessor of the secret of the atomic bomb This means that no indus-trial area in the Nation can be considered safe from attackrdquo20 To guar-antee survival the National Security Resources Board insisted wouldrequire that productive capacity be protected ldquoThe dispersion (or

14 Grey Room 04

Site selection for securitySource Industrial DispersionNational Security ResourcesBoard Is Your Plant a Target(Washington DC US Govern-ment Printing Of ce 1951)

deployment in space) of new plant development for war-supportingindustries can make American production less vulnerable to attackrdquoSpace could protect men at the battleeld the authors continued andspace by multiplying targets would diminish ldquothe vulnerability of anyone concentrationrdquo

Behind this national program lay four principles First the disper-sion would be of new industries rather than old second ldquono region ofthe country is to be built up at the expense of anotherrdquo third the dis-persion would take place within so-called ldquomarketing areasrdquo and fourthstate and local governments with private industry would initiate thechange and the federal government would encourage and providetechnical guidance

To tempt industrialists the Feds advertised additional benets thatwould accrue to those industries that dispersed better working andliving conditions for workers greater production by avoiding urbancongestion a healthier more stable economy Adding further quitematerial sweeteners to the mix the federal government promised toallocate ldquocerticates of necessityrdquo critical materials emergency loansand defense contracts to those industries that escaped the connes ofurban concentration Reading the booklet the industrialist and thecivic leader could begin asking themselves these questions

The handy cow pasture on the edge of town may look like a goodsite but does it measure up to the all-important security stan-dards Is it strategically located in relation to labor supply fueltransportation and other requirements for efcient and econom-

Galison | War against the Center 15

ical production Is the site properly located in relation to futurehomes shops schools and other community developments Hasfull consideration been given to efcient wartime productionand long-term benets to industry and community When youhave answered these questions you are on the way to developinga sound industrial dispersion program21

Industrialists swarmed toward Washington to assess the new plansGathered under the auspices of the Executive Ofce of the President

the National Security Resources Board assembled the key players on 7September 1951 in the Executive Ofce Building in Washington DC

Jack Small chairman of the Munitions Board told the assembledthat he was more scared now than when he came down to Washingtonsome nine months earlier

In the intervening time that God has given us we have madeprogress in the production of weapons getting new weaponsmade and creating a force strength but we are not yet ready andwe are in really desperate danger in the event that our enemyattacks For Godrsquos sake donrsquot get the idea that this thing isover or that the danger has nished or that these fanatic enemiesof ours have changed their plans or objectives one iota Theyhave not We will have achieved by next year a posture ofmore strength but still it will not be enough strength to pre-vent aggression

The ldquoall-outrdquo could come at any moment Small insisted to the indus-trialists and it could come by intention or by accident There was onlyone hope ldquoSpace is the one thing that really worksrdquo22

Soon however the discussion turned away from plutonium andtoward prots How queried the representatives from Alabama andLouisiana might this dispersion bring industry to their areas and awayfrom the Northeast which already had such access to the federal silverspoon Industrialists wondered aloud how much federal force-feedingthere would be and the ofcials reassured them that they intended inno way to damage business interests lower productivity or threaten a lossof labor supply This was to be dispersion within a marketing areamdashnot wholesale relocation to distant states

Small and his colleagues in dispersion left the audience withsomewhat vague injunctions But the national policy did vastly moreit aimed to make citizens of every community into target analysts oftheir own region As the Bureau of Commerce patiently explainedldquomaterials and methods for identifying the potential target areas aredescribed on the following pagesrdquo23 Those ldquopotential target areasrdquo

16 Grey Room 04

were the cities and towns of the United States Here is how the Commerce Department directed every community

but especially the top 168 metropolitan areas to proceed First checkthe list of industrial classifications and identify all those plantsemploying more than one hundred workers per peak shift These ranfrom industrial inorganic chemicals coke and byproducts to steelmills engines aircraft scientific instruments photographic equip-ment and ordnance Then identify those locations on a map (naturallynot disclosing the precise role of any single plant to unwanted eyes)Combine this information with outlines of heavily populated sectionsfollowing the information of the Census Bureau Lay out two largemaps (one inch equals one mile) showing political subdivisions arterialhighways railroads ports and harbors alongside industrial areas Nextdraw a series of four-inch (four-mile) circles on transparent overlaysmdashthese correspond to the area destroyed by an atomic bomb

Now you are ready to identify your regionrsquos target zones ldquothose areasthat contain sufcient concentrations of industry or population so asto constitute attractive atom-bomb targetsrdquo24 Just ldquoattractive atom-bombtargetsrdquo not sites ldquolikely to be targeted by the Russiansrdquomdashthe reifiedshorthand compresses all those years of wartime and then postwar tar-geting Your goal in what follows is to use these circles to form a targetout of the city as a whole by transecting the four-mile-diameter circlesonce they are judiciously located In particular the full target will contain both valuable defense-related industries (employing 16000workers in toto) or a residential population of 200000 people

Here is the schematic procedureThis region outlined by the dark line encloses the ldquohighly indus-

trialized sectionrdquo as defined by the National Industrial DispersionProgram Next each community is to plot the census tracts on the sec-ond set of working maps At the center of each tract goes a dot and thepopulation Again you overlay a four-mile transparent circle movingit until it circles a population of 200000 When you connect the centersof these 200000-person circles you have formed a ldquodensely populatedsectionrdquo Next join the two maps in such a way as to form a combinedarea embracing the high density of regions of both industry and popu-lation This joint region the Commerce Department declared wouldbe known as a potential A-bomb target zone From that zone measureten inches (ten miles) out to form the dispersal limit line There is yourgoal Locate all future critical industry and its associated populationspast the line of safety taking care not to create inadvertently a secondarypotential A-bomb target zone

These maps were not designed just to scare they would form witha factory proposal an application for a ldquocerticate of necessityrdquo (granting

Galison | War against the Center 17

18 Grey Room 04

Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo

Boundary of highly industrial ized section

Census-tract population centers with population gures

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of highly industrialized section

Galison | War against the Center 19

Top row left to right Self-targeting step I Take the listof government designated defense-related industries and plot theirlocation and employment This isthe rst task towards the construc-tion of areas known as the highlyindustrialized sections Source USDepartment of Commerce Indus-trial Dispersion Guidebook forCommunities Domestic CommerceSeries no 31 (Washington DCUS Government Printing Of ce1952)

Self-targeting step II To completethe construction of the perimeterof the highly industrialized sectionsdraw circles of four-mile radiusconnect centers of circles contain-ing more than 16000 workersSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step III Label populations from census tractsSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Bottom row left to right Self-targeting step IV To completethe construction of the denselypopulated sections draw circles offour-mile radius and connect thecenters of circles with more than200000 inhabitants SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Self-targeting step V Now super-impose the highly industrializedarea on the densely populatedarea Taken together they form the potential A-bomb Target zoneSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step VI Drawingthe potential A-bomb target zoneon a regional map planners shouldnow construct a safety margin often miles from the outside of theendangered area All new industrialplants should be dispersed out-side this ten-mile radius SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Census-tract population centers with population gures

accelerated tax amortization) facilitating the approval of defense loansand securing defense contracts

Bombing the Axis economy and dispersing the American one werereflections of one another When Charles E Wilson director of theOffice of Defense Mobilization came before the National SecurityResources Board of the Presidentrsquos Executive Office he needed anexpert on how to disperse industry To the captains of industry assem-bled for a 1951 hearing Wilson sought to justify his strictures aboutsplitting plants by ten or twenty miles ldquoMr Gorrie brought me a realexpert on that I call him a real expert because he was one of the menwho had done bombing in the industrial arena of Germany and cer-tainly he convinced me that 10 or 20 miles provides reasonable safetyrdquo25

Bombers braced for bombsIn 1952 Project East River (Associated Universities contracted to the

federal government) reported on how Washington could drive indus-try outside the expanding urban areas ldquoleapfroggingrdquo away from urbancores One role was to create ldquopublic understandingrdquo of the need forldquosatellite townrdquo planning and its defense use More materially theEast River gang reported the federal government should provide aidto assist in the construction of urban arteries to the satellite towns pro-vide rent subsidies to small businesses send appropriations to matchmetropolitan planning units offer tax assistance for new constructionin outlying areas demand dispersal to qualify for federal defenseinsurance and promote federal loans and grants for the constructionof outlying schools streets water and sewers The government shouldsubsidize ring roads around citiesmdashlike Route 128 around Bostonmdashand strive to locate defense industry on it Above all the fast-increas-ing population ofce building and industry heading into cities had tobe reversed Throughout constant vigilance against the re-creation ofnew centers26

Eponymously the report took as its ldquoarea studyrdquo the imagined caseof a Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapon detonated several thousand feetabove a 260-acre rectangle in Manhattan adjacent to the East RiverWith detailed information about the age structure and flammabilityof individual buildingsmdashand recent census datamdashthis not-so-typicalpiece of America could then be tracked as it shattered and burnedunder the assault of nuclear attack How many of the 35000 peopleresiding between 59th and 72nd Streets (between 3rd Avenue and theriver) would become casualties if a weapon were to be exploded at 2 AM How many minutesrsquo warning would they have to take shelterHow much radiation would they receive Would a firestorm eruptBased principally on the results of the US Strategic Bombing Surveyon Hiroshima and Nagasaki this report was in a sense a dully terrifying

20 Grey Room 04

answer to the question the Bombing Survey had posed seven years earlier What would the bombs that were let loose over Hiroshima havelooked like were they to have been dropped back home27

Under the guidance of these various boards and the lucrative drawof taxes loans and contracts one by one key industrial and civic leaderslearned to see themselves through the reflection of a bombsight Oneby one they began plotting their own dispersion In September 1955for example the Chemical and Engineering News reported on atomicvulnerability in the chemical process industry Nuclear weapons jetairplanes and the concept of total war combined wrote Neil P HurleySJ to blur the distinction between military force and industrial poten-tial The role of an industrymdashits functional interdependence on otherindustriesmdashxed the likelihood of its plants becoming targets Chemical-process industries were vulnerable on two fronts geographic concen-tration and functional criticality The conclusion was as inevitable asit was fearsome ldquoThree well-directed H-bombs on these key targetareas would have serious consequences for the industrial chemicalproducing complexrdquo28 Two-thirds of workers making industrial chem-icals lived in ten states

American chemical dispersion in 1955 was directly and explicitlylinked to German chemical dispersion in 1945 Over and over againHurley cited the Strategic Bombing Survey ldquoIt is worth noting thatantifriction bearings represented an Achilles heel in the German econ-omy in World War II The Strategic Bombing Survey indicated a paral-ysis of German industry following Allied air force bombings ofSchweinfurt where more than 50 of German antifriction bearingswere producedrdquo Four H-bombs for example could wipe out half the UScapacity to produce instruments and related products ldquoUnfortunatelythe US has many Schweinfurts In the Great Lakes region are to befound 47 of the nonelectrical machinery productionrdquo A saturationattack on that regionmdashand saturation would not take many bombsmdashwould Hurley noted destroy a vast array of industries including thatof chemicals29

Throughout the 1950s the Strategic Bombing Survey remained cen-tral to thinking about nuclear warfare and the dispersion of industryHurley for example in constructing his report on American chemicalpriorities reproduced the Surveyrsquos list of the ten most vital chemicalsfor the German war effort from nitrogen methanol and calcium car-bide down to caustic soda chlorine and sodium carbonate He reca-pitulated the Surveyrsquos conclusions about the shortages of nitric acid onthe manufacture of explosives the reduction of methanol that cut intothe making of high explosives and the Germansrsquo vain last-ditch effortsto create underground factories In this new narrative Americans

Galison | War against the Center 21

played the role previously performed by Germans Russians took overthe bombing role from the Allies Those who had used their knowledgeof American industry had planned the strategic bombing of the Axisnow they became the potential bombing victims readying plans to disperse Here is Hurley

To avoid a repetition in this country of the unfortunate experi-ences of the Germans during World War II necessary moves mustbe made before any outbreak of hostilities The Germans enjoyedthe luxury of learning from their mistakes It is highly doubtfulwhether in the atomic age any nation will have the same oppor-tunitymdashone mistake may well be the last30

Dispersal could aid in reconstruction and also preventionmdasha strongernation ldquoprotected in spacerdquo (as the phrase went) would deter any attacker

Admiral Ben Moreell retired from the Navy and in the mid-1950schairman of Jones amp Laughlin Steel Corporation had just presented tothe secretary of commerce the manifesto of the purposes of the Ironand Steel Advisory Council The council had urged a mobilization planfor steel in light of the threat presented by high-speed jet airplaneslong-range missiles and nuclear weapons that ldquoour prospectiveenemyrdquo might at any time hurl without warning Big steel needed acomplete control center one linked by telegraph and radio to the steel-making plants Admiral Moreell and his fellow advisers emphasizedthe proximate danger of Russians with H-bombs and in fact asMoreell noted they had one just a few days after his committee laid itsreport at Commerce Worriedly the admiral allowed that 75 percent ofAmerican steelmaking capacity could be destroyed by a mere tenhydrogen bombs The councilrsquos recommendation disperse 25 percentof the capacity in such a way that the resulting plants would be splitup into numerous single-function plants providing each plant with atleast three alternative modes for transporting its products It was timeMoreell intoned to take similar measures in a host of other industriesincluding rubber copper glass aluminum textiles automobiles andelectrical products Prepare for real costs for steel alone the disper-sion bill would run to some $10 billion

Moreell ldquoPerhaps I have overemphasized the hazard under whichwe now live I do not believe so The facts which are coming out withrespect to the tactics and policies of the Communist enemy in Chinaand Korea added to what we already know about them justify the con-clusion that we are facing a ruthless adversary who will permit nohumane consideration to inuence his decisions who will strike with-out prior warning and whose ambition is to rule the worldrdquo31

Dispersion might help the admiral concluded Like so much of this lit-

22 Grey Room 04

Opposite top Where the steelindustry is concentrated Source Admiral Ben MoreellldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do toUS Industriesrdquo US News andWorld Report 7 May 1954

Opposite bottom Destroyingsteel Source Moreell ldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do to USIndustriesrdquo

erature issues of protability and patriotism stood side by side and heconcluded under the ag gesturing to the Founding Father ldquoIn timeof peace prepare for warrdquo

Preparations advanced In 1956 Industrial Development a nationalmagazine dedicated to ldquoarea analysis and business site selectionrdquoreported that the Ofce of Area Development had reviewed and approvedsome fty-eight of the self-prepared urban area surveys Money talkedBy mid-June 1955 projects valued at $30 billion had qualied for taxabatements under the program

Take Milwaukee In December 1953 the cityrsquos mayor Frank Zeidlertraveled to the White House where the president addressed some twohundred large-city mayors in stark terms ldquoFor the rst time in historycities have become principal targets for an enemy seeking to conquerour nation The city has moved from a position of support in the rear Ithas moved out into the front linerdquo Immediately Zeidler arrangedto meet with the Wisconsin governor and the mayors of RacineMadison and Green Joining the chorus of civil defense authorities themayors agreed that in the short term they would need plans for rapidevacuation in the event of a nuclear attack at the same time theyneeded to begin longer-term planning for the dispersal of the city By

Galison | War against the Center 23

May 1954 Milwaukee had its report ldquoNew building in the core of anurban target [ought to] be prohibited except when it replaces existingstructures This is intended to halt the pouring of greater target valuesinto areas which are already richly rewarding as targetsrdquo Spreadingindustry wasnrsquot all that the report advocated The new region wouldneed new school districts novel tax structures and alternative typesof local governments Zoning would force dispersal from the centerinstitute bands of open space and deliver industrial plants to hinter-lands deliberately bypassed by major radial or circumferential roads inorder to avoid creating secondary concentrations ldquoThere is little doubtrdquothe reportrsquos author reckoned ldquothat some of [these] measures wouldhave to be fought through the Supreme Court before they were acceptedby allrdquo32 Pressed by national codes taxes defense spending andimprecations by the president on down local and federal authoritiescompeted to outdo the other in the rush away from the targeted center

America was not alone in declaring war on the urban center Canadain the midst of a major effort to plan urban growth in 1956 also begandefensive dispersal The Ofce of the Civil Defence Coordinator in col-laboration with the Defence Research Board and McGill Universityprepared a Guide to Urban Dispersal ldquoDispersal is the characteristicof present day urban growthrdquo the authors asserted Satellite towns andvillages made urban regions the right scale on which to re-think pat-terns of communication government and demography ldquoDefence iscritical In modern warfare the initial blow is struck at the civilian pop-ulation to destroy at a stroke the ability to resist The greatest vulnera-bility lies in urban concentrationmdashthe greatest security would beachieved by urban dispersalrdquo That dispersal would follow a survey ofa ring located an H-bomb radius away from the regional center That is

24 Grey Room 04

where the Guide came in Based in part on a real area and in part ongeneric characteristics the book was a how-to manual for planning thescattering of the urban into the regional Slope of the land location ofwater avenues of communication and transport needs all had to bereckoned The Guide instructed local leaders and planners how to dia-gram all this for their future Satellite towns would perch outside thering of safetymdashtowns that under no circumstances ought to attractmore than forty thousand inhabitants Ultimately government-pro-pelled ldquourban regionsrdquo would replace the ldquoamorphous formrdquo of currentmetropolitan development alleviating social and economic problemswhile securing spatial defense against thermonuclear attack33 City bycity country by country the bomb helped drive dispersion Indeedcoming full circle the Germans already all too familiar with aerialbombardment began preparing for a rain of hydrogen bombsHannover Bremen and Duumlsseldorf issued the rst three analyses andothers would follow Their comprehensive treatments covered the sta-tus of police re hospital postal service and road service followinga nuclear attack34

Preparation for atomic war was certainly on President Dwight DEisenhowerrsquos mind as he strove to resuscitate the long-debated federalhighway system Franklin D Roosevelt had pushed the idea in the1930s not least for its promise of providing jobs Reports rolled in TheBureau of Public Roads undertook one in 1938 and the chairman ofthat organization presided over another called Interregional Highwaysdated 1943 Other reports and standards marched on through the warwith some actually leading to road buildingmdashin 1947 crews began cut-ting the rst miles of interstate highways Still by the time Eisenhowercame into office in January 1953 there were but six thousand or somiles of road improvements actually on the ground (at a cost of nearly$1 billion)

Eisenhower liked highways He had struggled across the country ina motorized convoy back in 1919 an unpleasant sixty-two days of slip-ping on ice sticking in mud breaking into wooden bridges and freez-ing under snow The contrast with Germany was stark As SupremeCommander General Eisenhower had been astonished by the auto-bahns taking particular note of the advantages that road system affordedas he had to move masses of men and mateacuteriel across the conqueredReich ldquoGermany made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons acrossthe landrdquo On July 12 1954 Vice President Richard Nixon facing theconference of state governors at Lake George New York read fromEisenhowerrsquos prepared speech and the message was clear The obso-lete network had to go its antiquated byways were clogging the roadsand courts while leaving a death toll on the citizenry comparable to

Galison | War against the Center 25

Industrial dispersal 1956 Solidcircles show cities where dispersalplans were approved by late 1955dotted circles indicate communi-ties where plans were under prepa-ration Source Theodore K PasmaldquoIndustrial Dispersal 1956rdquo Indus-trial Development The NationalMagazine of Area Analysis andBusiness Site Selection (January-February 1956)

ldquoa bloody warrdquo But Eisenhowerrsquos final jab at the current system wasstark holding up for public contemplation its ldquoappalling inadequaciesto meet the demands of catastrophe or defense should an atomic warcomerdquo35 Radial roads would afford clear routes for city evacuationCircumferential roads Project East River had recommended back in1952 should be encouraged wherever possible to drain industry andpopulation from the dense city centers36 In fact highway designersconsulted with federal civil defense agencies and military plannersaimed for interstate highways that would bypass urban areas to avoidldquoroute[s] that had suffered a direct A-bomb hitrdquo37 It took two years ofpolitical wrangling and it goes without saying that economic housingand non-nuclear forces for the interstate were surely among its powerfulmotors By the end of 1956 the Interstate and Defense Highway Systemhad fundingmdashsome $25 billion of federal support38

3 Distributed KnowledgeBy 1960 the Air Force began dreaming worse nightmares than nuke-ladenbombers bullying their way past ghter defense Atomic strikes againstthe continental United States could be launched with missiles forwhich range of ight was no longer an issue The RAND Corporationmade its mark with contracts to think about this thermonuclear threatfrom the new think tank issued shelves of studies including thefamous (and famously parodied) volume by Herman Kahn On Thermo-nuclear War Just as Kahn stepped into the limelight the much lesswell known Paul Baran an electrical engineer coming from HughesAircraft Companyrsquos systems group joined RAND His job was todevelop a scheme that would ensure the survival of the US telecom-munications infrastructure through a Russian rst strikemdasha vital linknot only for domestic communication but also for command and con-trol His response in a series of papers launched in 1960 was a plan toremove completely critical nodes from the telephone system Like thethree highways many wanted from each dispersed defense plantBaranrsquos vision aimed for safety in redundantly connected spatially dis-tributed mini-centers

Here is how Baran put it in one of his rst papers

The cloud-of-doom attitude that nuclear war spells the end of theearth is slowly lifting from the minds of the many Better quanti-tative estimates of post-attack destruction together with a lessemotional discussion of the alternatives may mark the end of theldquowhat the hellmdashwhatrsquos the userdquo era A new view emerges the pos-sibility of a war exists but there is much that can be done to min-imize the consequences

26 Grey Room 04

De nition of redundancy Paul Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunications I Introductionto Distributed CommunicationsNetworkrdquo RAND Corporationmemorandum RM-3420-PRAugust 1964

Survivable atomic warmdashthe goal of the fteen-year struggle since theSurvey crew picked through the still radioactive rubble at HiroshimaBaran again

If war does not mean the end of the earth in a black and whitemanner then it follows that we should do those things that makethe shade of gray as light as possible to plan now to minimizepotential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permitthe survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstructthe economy swiftly39

That reconstruction demanded the elimination of the hierarchical center alternately referred to over these rst decades of the cold war asthe linchpin the bottleneck and the node

The problem as Baran formulated it did involve new equipment tolabel digitally each packet of information with a ldquotordquo and ldquofromrdquo andthen to route these fragments over diverse paths toward their eventualreassembly on arrival But before anything could be built moved dig-itized or reinforced the conceptual problem required attention Thatreconceptualization now took as it had not before a mathematicalform If nodes were replaced with redundant links how could heexploit the information-theoretic approach of Claude Shannon to countthe surviving paths between points in the array

Here is how Baran reasoned

Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network whichwill allow several hundred major communications stations to talkwith one another after an enemy attack As a criterion of surviv-ability we elect to use the percentage of stations both survivingthe physical attack and remaining in electrical connection withthe largest single group of surviving stations This criterion ischosen as a conservative measure of the ability of the survivingstations to operate together as a coherent entity after the attack40

With the result that a redundancy of at least R = 3would ensure a likely survival rate of nearly 75 percentBaran could now sketch the distributed system thatwould vouchsafe communication after nuclear war

Worst obviously was the centralized node that rep-resented the single critical target This was the situationwith concentrated steel electricity or oil plants it wasthe structure of the hubbed railway system It was inshort the bombing plannerrsquos dream and the bombingvictimrsquos nightmare Decentralized nodes that main-tained a local hierarchical structure were clearly better

Galison | War against the Center 27

a complete grid structure was best of all To a certain extent such gridsstood for the defensive ideal of dispersion more generally By increasingthe number of targets one decreased the likelihood of incapacitationHalting abortive and awkward though it was Baranrsquos scheme (alongwith a similar one developed in England) slowly wended its way throughdifferent incarnations in the ARPANET and Milnet But the elusivegoal all through these decades of distributed communication was a dis-tributed grid or mesh a thrust in the rst instance aimed at removingthe critical node Though in the garb of nuclear survivability the gridmay not appear as the redemptive Internet of our dreams that tech-nology grew directly out of fifteen years of longing for a world stillstanding after thermonuclear war41

4 We Are Become TargetsDuring the years of World War II American and British planners andanalysts learned to see through a bombsight Not in a single glimpsebut in the routine killings and losses that accompanied ever more fre-quently repeated raids Twenty-four hours a day day after day monthafter month year after year the planners and analysts studied andrestudied the interdependencies of the German economy circled tar-gets blasted factories leveled cities analyzed the damage and struckagain Chemicals nitric acid methanol Basic materials rubber steeloil aviation gas Transport systems electrical generators And popula-tion centers area bombing by the combined American and Britishforces killed some 600000 Germans In a war that the Nazis renderedever more vicious even as their defeat seemed inevitable the Americansrsquoearly dreams of precision bombing went by the way Two hundredplanes over Schweinfurt then four hundred but also Hamburg LuumlbeckMuumlnster Berlin Dresden Regensburg year after year Measuring bombloads accuracies reconstruction time 35 ton of bombs per acre toinduce damage of 8 percent delay time for reconstruction two and a

28 Grey Room 04

half months A calculus of fractions probabilities delaysBy the warrsquos end a new category of analyst had come into existence

more often than not social scientists and industrialists but also human-ists diplomats mathematicians and natural scientists Piecing togetherfragments of intelligence examining reconnaissance photographs theypainted an elaborate portrait of a wartime foe By warrsquos end the Surveyanalysts had come to see German and Japanese cities through what onemight call a ldquodestructive functionalismrdquo dependencies leading back-ward they kept hoping to the ever-elusive linchpin that when pulledwould topple the structure Schweinfurt was supposed to be one suchpoint with its all-important bearing factories And after Schweinfurtthere were other ldquobottlenecksrdquo to be targeted other cities other plantsother transshipment points

Perhaps before Hiroshima the bombsight eye had already begun toreect back I donrsquot know But in the atomic rubble as the analysts inter-viewed hundreds of blast survivors and canvassed the broken struc-tures as they methodically noted which kinds of concrete walls stillstood at various radii of destruction they began quite explicitly to seethemselves to see America through the bombardierrsquos eye They beganto wonder what an American city would look like after the bomb hadfallen Returning to the United States and publishing their StrategicBombing Survey things began to look different They began to see them-selves their towns and factories on the crosshairs of radial targetingmaps Far from a technological determinism the all-too material tech-nologies and concepts of self were fully imbricated

One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics launched when NorbertWiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedbackmachine that could be mimicked electronically from there it was a shortstep to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way Then humanphysiology began to appear as a cybernetic system then the humanmind then life then even the world system as a whole42 Somewherein the midst of total war a technocratic vision of a technical EnemyOther rose to become a vision of ourselves It was but a heartbeat beforecybernetics saturated the writings of Gregory Bateson and MargaretMead not to speak of philosophers planners and architects

But the consequence was this Three years before the Russians hadthe bomb in fact before on just about anyonersquos account the cold warhad begun American analysts were already advocating a massive dis-persion of factories and populations against atomic aerial attack

As the cold war arms race accelerated the search for ldquodefense in spacerdquogrew more desperate jet bombers atomic bombs hydrogen bombsintercontinental ballistic missiles With each step more frantic urgingto spread the cities into their ldquomarketing areasrdquo Highway systems

Galison | War against the Center 29

Centralized decentralized and distributed networksSource Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

late capitalism Others like Charles Jencks mapped the de-centering backto a cultural context of literary theory and philosophy More recentwork by Peter Rowe and others importantly attends to the remarkablejuxtaposition that has characterized suburban growthmdashon the one handpulling toward technical rational planning and on the other toward anarcadian imaginary3

Here I would like to point toward an architectural dispersion ratherless abstract than that celebrated by a generalized zeitgeist by a shift inan economic base ldquoreectedrdquo in the cultural superstructure by an epochalpostwar taste change toward suburban life or by an entropic ow awayfrom an ordered city core No doubt such intellectual pragmatic aestheticand stochastic drives did contribute to the pressure driving dense citycores outward But today I want to begin elsewhere Not in 1973 with theoil crisis and subsequent economic upheaval nor with the social upheavalsor deconstructivist literary-theoretical work of the 1960s Nor for thatmatter will I start with the Internet though I will come back to it

Instead I will address bombs the bombs of the long war that in acertain sense began in the 1930s accelerated after the Nazi seizureof power continued across the end of World War II through the coldwar and even past the fall of the Soviet Union into the present unset-tled moment But we need to step back two decades before the 1960s

As British and American planners began designing their strategiesfor the massive bombing campaign of the war the targeters joined theelite civilian sectors of law business academic social science and eco-nomics Together they composed the Army Air Forcersquos Committee ofOperations Analysts ldquoOperations analysisrdquo was essentially a methodi-cal theoretical reconstruction of the interconnections that held togetherthe German economy and war machine and that asked how it could beblown apart Where they asked were its nodal points the linchpinsthat when pulled would topple the economy forcing the Nazi warmachine to a halt Analyzing this whole processmdashthat is the effects ofthe bombing effortmdashwas the US Strategic Bombing Survey foundedin 1944 while Flying Fortresses were still leaving each day for Germantargets from the airelds of East Anglia The Survey was an immenseaffair employing well over a thousand people including as ldquodirec-torsrdquo specic mostly industrial experts on their topics For examplethe head of a major mining rm directed work on munitions the exec-utive vice president and general manager of Standard Oil directed thepetroleum division and a former vice president of the Curtiss-WrightCorporation ran the Aircraft Division Appropriately enough FranklindrsquoOlier president of Prudential Insurance ran the whole of the Surveymdashthe greatest damage-assessment program in history Among the majorgures running other divisions were John Kenneth Galbraith (overall

8 Grey Room 04

Organization chart US StrategicBombing Survey (USSBS)Source US Strategic BombingSurvey Overall Report (EuropeanWar) 30 September 1945reprinted with an introduction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976)

economic effects) George Ball (transportation) and Paul Nitze (equipmentand utilities)4 Starting on the lower rungs of the ladder were Marxisteconomist Paul Baran and poet W H Auden5

One of the rst targets was the Luftwaffe itself a task in destructionthat the Army Air Force aimed to complete by pulverizing airframe fac-tories This proved vastly more difcult than the Allies expected Afterdismissing the Versailles agreement forbidding the construction of airpower the Nazi regime hammered into place a German air forceproofed as far as possible against enemy attack Emphasizing protec-tion for their factories against air raids the Luftwaffe planners sited newplants away from frontiers in suburban or country districts concealingstructures deploying camouage separating buildings within the plantsand providing on-site air raid shelters for workers The Reich pooledpatents and structured the airframe ldquocomplexrdquo so that spatially separatedplants could stamp out replaceable segments of their completed prod-uct It was an efcient powerful apparatus that as the Survey promptlyconceded continued to produce an abundance of ghters and bomberseven under the years-long rain of explosives6

Responding to some fourteen attacks on the German aircraft industrybetween July and December 1943 the Germans dispersed their facto-ries as rapidly as they could For example initial American and Britishattacks against the Focke-Wulf plant at Bremen and the Heinkel plant atRostock were not very successful worse for the Allies the bomb runsled the German authorities to splinter Focke-Wulf production from the heartland in Bremen into East Prussia and Poland Not only did this dispersal open new forced labor supplies to the Nazis but it would also the Germans believed put the plants out of harmrsquos rangeLarge-scale dispersion began during the Allied assault of the secondhalf of 1943 and compulsory dispersion took hold in February 19447

Galison | War against the Center 9

To realize these goals Albert Speerrsquos assistant Karl-Otto Saur createda vast ldquoghter staffrdquo from which one member was dispatched perma-nently to every airframe factory in the Reich even as the fighter staffpartitioned the factories into hundreds of sites many of which stood inforest clearings8 Acknowledging the success of the dispersal programthe Strategic Bombing Survey allowed that Nazi airframe productionactually increased during 1944 They concluded that Germany lostcontrol of the air not by a lack of planes but by the shortage of well-trained pilots and aviation fuel

But the operations analysts selecting targets were not just after par-ticular pieces of munitions factories their goal was to precipitate a col-lapse of the German economy as a whole To that end they directed aseries of studies designed to locate just those plants where destructionwould cause shortages to ripple through the entire system Operationsfollowed Henry ldquoHaprdquo Arnold for example tempted Harry Hopkinswith the notion that blasting the German ball bearing industry ldquowouldprobably wreck all German industryrdquo9

At the top of the Alliesrsquo bombing priority list stood ball bearingswithout which they reckoned German machinery would quite literallygrind to a halt As the authors of the Strategic Bombing Survey put it

On the afternoon of the 17th of August 1943 some 200 FlyingFortresses flying from their bases in England deep into Bavariaand unescorted after reaching the German border struck the rstgreat blow aimed at the complete destruction of an entire andessential segment of the German war economy10

Some 52 percent of German bearing production lay in an enormousfactory complex at Schweinfurt US Army Air Force planes hit the

10 Grey Room 04

city with some four hundred tons of bombs while the Germans struckdown thirty-six of the attackers The raids continued with some eleventhousand tons of bombs dropped the most destructive of which tookplace on 14 October 1943 Again over two hundred planes descendedon the plant letting loose 450 tons of high explosives and incendiariesdestroying 10 percent of the machinery 20 percent of the stock and350000 square feet of plant German antindashaircraft batteries and ghtersshot down an even greater number of planes than on the earlier bigraid killing some six hundred airmen As a direct result of that attackSpeer near panic put his closest associate Philip Kessler in charge ofprotecting and dispersing the bearing industry By August 1944 whenthe Allies ew an eight-hundred-plane raid against Schweinfurt half thefactory was elsewhere11 Having faced this barrage the Germans braggedat warrsquos end ldquoEs ist kein Geraet zurueck geblieben weil Waelzlagerfehltenrdquo (No equipment was left behind because bearings were lacking)American analysts ought to take the lesson to heart the authors of theStrategic Bombing Survey insisted ldquoeven in the case of a very concen-trated industry very heavy and continuous attack must be made sinceotherwise the enemy if he can survive the initial shock will be able totake successful countermeasuresrdquo12

These target categories airframes and bearings were supposed tohave choked the German war-making capacity Both after a frantic dis-persal lost the vulnerability that the Americans expected Consequentlystarting in spring 1944 Allied strategy broadened in large measurebecause by then they had air superiority over the entirety of GermanyPlanners began to plot two new ldquobottlenecksrdquo to squeeze shut First theoperations analysts began directing airplanes against the synthetic oilindustrymdashthat is oil produced with the massive coal deposits of the

Ruhr They hit the steel industry hard anddrove massive missions against chemicalplants By doing so they aimed simultane-ously to damage the German home economyand to cripple rolling armor at the front

While reporting successful ldquobottleneckrdquoattacks such as the campaign against oil thereport itself was in essence doing its ownreconstruction of the German economymdashand its authors did not hesitate to point outwhere the original planners had failed tofind a vulnerable point For example theylamented that the combined Allied air forceslet loose only 05 percent of their bomb loadon the electrical industry even though the

Galison | War against the Center 11

Opposite Bombs dropped on German bearing targetsSource USSBS

Left German crude steel production Source USSBS

Germans themselves (as Speer later asserted) were terried of an engulf-ing Allied drive against German generating stations Power plants wereconcentrated in a limited number of locations generators could notstockpile their electrical product and the Germans had a terrible timerepairing damaged power stations Perusing captured documents theStrategic Bombing Survey authors reported

The secret minutes of the central planning committee studyingthe power shortage make this weakness clear The difculties ofadding capacity the limitations of the so-called grid system therelationship of curtailment and shortage of electric energy to pro-duction losses in industry and their fears that their extreme vul-nerability would be discovered are all paraded openly in theseminutes made by the Germans in the midst of the war13

Hitting forty-ve plants would have been dangerous for Germany as awholemdasha result they justified by testimony from Speer himself Andthese plants unlike much else could not be dispersed Similarly ldquoamajor opportunity in the Allied air offensive against oil was unexploitedrdquoin that the production of ethyl uid was crucial for aviation fuel andethyl uid required tertraethyl lead There were only two tetraethyl leadplants in Germany These the report insisted should have been hit14

Or again ldquoconcentration on the few synthetic rubber plants as a primarybombing target early in the war would have proven protablerdquo15

Again and again the bomb analysts repeated their message Aerialwarfare worked when it hit concentrated centralized production stand-ing at a functional node upstream of many other industries Bombingfailed when the Germans effectively dispersed their factories Separa-tion in space worked exceedingly well in other sectors Beginning in1934 the Nazis had already scattered their explosive and propellantplants but only in 1944 had they launched (rather unsuccessful)attempts to decentralize plants producing nitrogen (needed for gun-powder) and methanol (crucial for high explosives)16 Similarly Speerand his most valued lieutenant Edmund Geilenberg scrambled des-perately in the nal months of the war to disperse J-2 jet fuel for theirlast-ditch attempt to stem air losses with their new wonder weaponthe jet ghter

2 The Bombsight MirrorWhile they were assessing the air war against Nazi Germany theStrategic Bombing Survey analysts had under way a massive inquiryinto the assault on Japan Without reviewing the bulk of their study ofconventional bombing I want to turn to the report they led on the atomicattacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki That text chronicles the horrific

12 Grey Room 04

effects of the blast separately and methodically outlining its effect onbuildings and bodies by pressure heat and radiation Taking the testi-mony of hundreds of survivors the analysts asked about morale inquiredabout feelings of rebellion toward the government about attitudestoward the United States The bomb surveyors even if briey exploredthe effect of the nuclear devastation on internal high-level Japanesedeliberations about the future of the war

Suddenly in the concluding section of the report the authors took adifferent tack and the tone changed Gone was the absolute distancethe surveyors had managed to maintain toward industrial targets citiesand military objectives All at once the weapons dropped on an enemyjust months before began to appear in an inverted vision in which thosesame weapons appeared turned against the United States

The Surveyrsquos investigators as they proceeded about their studyfound an insistent question framing itself in their minds ldquoWhat ifthe target for the bomb had been an American cityrdquo True the pri-mary mission of the Survey was to ascertain the facts just sum-marized But conclusions as to the meaning of those facts forcitizens of the United States forced themselves almost inescapablyon the men who examined thoughtfully the remains of Hiroshimaand Nagasaki17

Sifting the rubble interviewing the wounded survivors the BombingSurvey investigators began to see similarities between Japanese build-ings and American ones between surviving structures at Hiroshimaand possible shelters in the United States They made it clear in printthat they thought the two nuclear-devastated sites were the best argu-ment against war itself but they also began to speculate on howAmericans might survive the kinds of attacks they themselves had justvisited on the Japanese

The fate of industries in both cities again illustrates the value ofdecentralization All major factories in Hiroshima were on theperiphery of the citymdashand escaped serious damage at Nagasakiplants and dockyards at the southern end of the city were merelyintact but those in the valley where the bomb exploded wereseriously damaged18

Medical facilities typically located in the central parts of the cities lay in smoldering ruins So it had been in Hamburg where survivors of theraids had lain in shock without assistance in their hours of greatest need

Looking at Hiroshima Nagasaki and Hamburg Survey personnelbegan to see their own large cities Already in 1946 they pressed for adramatic shift in the way those cities were conceived

Galison | War against the Center 13

The similar peril of American cities and the extent to which wisezoning has diminished it differ from city to city Though a reshap-ing and partial dispersal of the national centers of activity aredrastic and difcult measures they represent a social and mili-tary ideal toward which very practical steps can be taken once thepolicy has been laid down19

Efforts toward decentralization remained desultory during 1947But already Congress had ordered the National Security ResourcesBoard to begin exploring industrial relocation Abruptly in the sum-mer of 1949 the laissez-faire mood ended For it was in August that theRussians detonated their rst atomic bomb named by the West Joe 1Despite nearly four years of warning that the Russians would probablyhave nuclear weapons within five years of the Trinity test Americanpolicy experts politicians military officers and atomic scientistsreacted with an alarm bordering on panic Called to offer a response tothe Russian bomb in October 1949 the General Advisory Committee(GAC) under J Robert Oppenheimer convened only to harden theirresistance to further escalation of the arms race In a surprising andunanimous vote the GAC recommended against building the hydrogenbomb on moral grounds A weapon of genocide they asserted an ldquoevilunder lightrdquo It was that anti-H-bomb decision soon ratied by the AtomicEnergy Commissioners that sent a ssure straight down the center of acommunity of scientists grown close-knit during the war

The GACrsquos H-bomb report catalyzed a swift hard struggle betweenopponents and proponents of this new category of weapon Lobbyingbegan in secretmdashand then burst into the public arena after a congressionalleak Editorials in newspapers magazines and television erupted onboth sides with debate continuing all the way up to President Harry S Trumanrsquos decision in January 1950 The country would in fact buildthe hydrogen bomb In June 1950 the Korean War beganmdashmobilizationindustrial and military heightened as never before and the govern-ment inaugurated a still-continuing national commitment to a hugemilitary establishment

It was in this context that in August 1951 the president announceda national policy for industrial dispersion and the National SecurityResources Board quickly followed with a booklet entitled Is Your Planta Target that proclaimed ldquoThe risk of an all-out atomic attack on theUnited States grows greater each day since we are no longer the solepossessor of the secret of the atomic bomb This means that no indus-trial area in the Nation can be considered safe from attackrdquo20 To guar-antee survival the National Security Resources Board insisted wouldrequire that productive capacity be protected ldquoThe dispersion (or

14 Grey Room 04

Site selection for securitySource Industrial DispersionNational Security ResourcesBoard Is Your Plant a Target(Washington DC US Govern-ment Printing Of ce 1951)

deployment in space) of new plant development for war-supportingindustries can make American production less vulnerable to attackrdquoSpace could protect men at the battleeld the authors continued andspace by multiplying targets would diminish ldquothe vulnerability of anyone concentrationrdquo

Behind this national program lay four principles First the disper-sion would be of new industries rather than old second ldquono region ofthe country is to be built up at the expense of anotherrdquo third the dis-persion would take place within so-called ldquomarketing areasrdquo and fourthstate and local governments with private industry would initiate thechange and the federal government would encourage and providetechnical guidance

To tempt industrialists the Feds advertised additional benets thatwould accrue to those industries that dispersed better working andliving conditions for workers greater production by avoiding urbancongestion a healthier more stable economy Adding further quitematerial sweeteners to the mix the federal government promised toallocate ldquocerticates of necessityrdquo critical materials emergency loansand defense contracts to those industries that escaped the connes ofurban concentration Reading the booklet the industrialist and thecivic leader could begin asking themselves these questions

The handy cow pasture on the edge of town may look like a goodsite but does it measure up to the all-important security stan-dards Is it strategically located in relation to labor supply fueltransportation and other requirements for efcient and econom-

Galison | War against the Center 15

ical production Is the site properly located in relation to futurehomes shops schools and other community developments Hasfull consideration been given to efcient wartime productionand long-term benets to industry and community When youhave answered these questions you are on the way to developinga sound industrial dispersion program21

Industrialists swarmed toward Washington to assess the new plansGathered under the auspices of the Executive Ofce of the President

the National Security Resources Board assembled the key players on 7September 1951 in the Executive Ofce Building in Washington DC

Jack Small chairman of the Munitions Board told the assembledthat he was more scared now than when he came down to Washingtonsome nine months earlier

In the intervening time that God has given us we have madeprogress in the production of weapons getting new weaponsmade and creating a force strength but we are not yet ready andwe are in really desperate danger in the event that our enemyattacks For Godrsquos sake donrsquot get the idea that this thing isover or that the danger has nished or that these fanatic enemiesof ours have changed their plans or objectives one iota Theyhave not We will have achieved by next year a posture ofmore strength but still it will not be enough strength to pre-vent aggression

The ldquoall-outrdquo could come at any moment Small insisted to the indus-trialists and it could come by intention or by accident There was onlyone hope ldquoSpace is the one thing that really worksrdquo22

Soon however the discussion turned away from plutonium andtoward prots How queried the representatives from Alabama andLouisiana might this dispersion bring industry to their areas and awayfrom the Northeast which already had such access to the federal silverspoon Industrialists wondered aloud how much federal force-feedingthere would be and the ofcials reassured them that they intended inno way to damage business interests lower productivity or threaten a lossof labor supply This was to be dispersion within a marketing areamdashnot wholesale relocation to distant states

Small and his colleagues in dispersion left the audience withsomewhat vague injunctions But the national policy did vastly moreit aimed to make citizens of every community into target analysts oftheir own region As the Bureau of Commerce patiently explainedldquomaterials and methods for identifying the potential target areas aredescribed on the following pagesrdquo23 Those ldquopotential target areasrdquo

16 Grey Room 04

were the cities and towns of the United States Here is how the Commerce Department directed every community

but especially the top 168 metropolitan areas to proceed First checkthe list of industrial classifications and identify all those plantsemploying more than one hundred workers per peak shift These ranfrom industrial inorganic chemicals coke and byproducts to steelmills engines aircraft scientific instruments photographic equip-ment and ordnance Then identify those locations on a map (naturallynot disclosing the precise role of any single plant to unwanted eyes)Combine this information with outlines of heavily populated sectionsfollowing the information of the Census Bureau Lay out two largemaps (one inch equals one mile) showing political subdivisions arterialhighways railroads ports and harbors alongside industrial areas Nextdraw a series of four-inch (four-mile) circles on transparent overlaysmdashthese correspond to the area destroyed by an atomic bomb

Now you are ready to identify your regionrsquos target zones ldquothose areasthat contain sufcient concentrations of industry or population so asto constitute attractive atom-bomb targetsrdquo24 Just ldquoattractive atom-bombtargetsrdquo not sites ldquolikely to be targeted by the Russiansrdquomdashthe reifiedshorthand compresses all those years of wartime and then postwar tar-geting Your goal in what follows is to use these circles to form a targetout of the city as a whole by transecting the four-mile-diameter circlesonce they are judiciously located In particular the full target will contain both valuable defense-related industries (employing 16000workers in toto) or a residential population of 200000 people

Here is the schematic procedureThis region outlined by the dark line encloses the ldquohighly indus-

trialized sectionrdquo as defined by the National Industrial DispersionProgram Next each community is to plot the census tracts on the sec-ond set of working maps At the center of each tract goes a dot and thepopulation Again you overlay a four-mile transparent circle movingit until it circles a population of 200000 When you connect the centersof these 200000-person circles you have formed a ldquodensely populatedsectionrdquo Next join the two maps in such a way as to form a combinedarea embracing the high density of regions of both industry and popu-lation This joint region the Commerce Department declared wouldbe known as a potential A-bomb target zone From that zone measureten inches (ten miles) out to form the dispersal limit line There is yourgoal Locate all future critical industry and its associated populationspast the line of safety taking care not to create inadvertently a secondarypotential A-bomb target zone

These maps were not designed just to scare they would form witha factory proposal an application for a ldquocerticate of necessityrdquo (granting

Galison | War against the Center 17

18 Grey Room 04

Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo

Boundary of highly industrial ized section

Census-tract population centers with population gures

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of highly industrialized section

Galison | War against the Center 19

Top row left to right Self-targeting step I Take the listof government designated defense-related industries and plot theirlocation and employment This isthe rst task towards the construc-tion of areas known as the highlyindustrialized sections Source USDepartment of Commerce Indus-trial Dispersion Guidebook forCommunities Domestic CommerceSeries no 31 (Washington DCUS Government Printing Of ce1952)

Self-targeting step II To completethe construction of the perimeterof the highly industrialized sectionsdraw circles of four-mile radiusconnect centers of circles contain-ing more than 16000 workersSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step III Label populations from census tractsSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Bottom row left to right Self-targeting step IV To completethe construction of the denselypopulated sections draw circles offour-mile radius and connect thecenters of circles with more than200000 inhabitants SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Self-targeting step V Now super-impose the highly industrializedarea on the densely populatedarea Taken together they form the potential A-bomb Target zoneSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step VI Drawingthe potential A-bomb target zoneon a regional map planners shouldnow construct a safety margin often miles from the outside of theendangered area All new industrialplants should be dispersed out-side this ten-mile radius SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Census-tract population centers with population gures

accelerated tax amortization) facilitating the approval of defense loansand securing defense contracts

Bombing the Axis economy and dispersing the American one werereflections of one another When Charles E Wilson director of theOffice of Defense Mobilization came before the National SecurityResources Board of the Presidentrsquos Executive Office he needed anexpert on how to disperse industry To the captains of industry assem-bled for a 1951 hearing Wilson sought to justify his strictures aboutsplitting plants by ten or twenty miles ldquoMr Gorrie brought me a realexpert on that I call him a real expert because he was one of the menwho had done bombing in the industrial arena of Germany and cer-tainly he convinced me that 10 or 20 miles provides reasonable safetyrdquo25

Bombers braced for bombsIn 1952 Project East River (Associated Universities contracted to the

federal government) reported on how Washington could drive indus-try outside the expanding urban areas ldquoleapfroggingrdquo away from urbancores One role was to create ldquopublic understandingrdquo of the need forldquosatellite townrdquo planning and its defense use More materially theEast River gang reported the federal government should provide aidto assist in the construction of urban arteries to the satellite towns pro-vide rent subsidies to small businesses send appropriations to matchmetropolitan planning units offer tax assistance for new constructionin outlying areas demand dispersal to qualify for federal defenseinsurance and promote federal loans and grants for the constructionof outlying schools streets water and sewers The government shouldsubsidize ring roads around citiesmdashlike Route 128 around Bostonmdashand strive to locate defense industry on it Above all the fast-increas-ing population ofce building and industry heading into cities had tobe reversed Throughout constant vigilance against the re-creation ofnew centers26

Eponymously the report took as its ldquoarea studyrdquo the imagined caseof a Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapon detonated several thousand feetabove a 260-acre rectangle in Manhattan adjacent to the East RiverWith detailed information about the age structure and flammabilityof individual buildingsmdashand recent census datamdashthis not-so-typicalpiece of America could then be tracked as it shattered and burnedunder the assault of nuclear attack How many of the 35000 peopleresiding between 59th and 72nd Streets (between 3rd Avenue and theriver) would become casualties if a weapon were to be exploded at 2 AM How many minutesrsquo warning would they have to take shelterHow much radiation would they receive Would a firestorm eruptBased principally on the results of the US Strategic Bombing Surveyon Hiroshima and Nagasaki this report was in a sense a dully terrifying

20 Grey Room 04

answer to the question the Bombing Survey had posed seven years earlier What would the bombs that were let loose over Hiroshima havelooked like were they to have been dropped back home27

Under the guidance of these various boards and the lucrative drawof taxes loans and contracts one by one key industrial and civic leaderslearned to see themselves through the reflection of a bombsight Oneby one they began plotting their own dispersion In September 1955for example the Chemical and Engineering News reported on atomicvulnerability in the chemical process industry Nuclear weapons jetairplanes and the concept of total war combined wrote Neil P HurleySJ to blur the distinction between military force and industrial poten-tial The role of an industrymdashits functional interdependence on otherindustriesmdashxed the likelihood of its plants becoming targets Chemical-process industries were vulnerable on two fronts geographic concen-tration and functional criticality The conclusion was as inevitable asit was fearsome ldquoThree well-directed H-bombs on these key targetareas would have serious consequences for the industrial chemicalproducing complexrdquo28 Two-thirds of workers making industrial chem-icals lived in ten states

American chemical dispersion in 1955 was directly and explicitlylinked to German chemical dispersion in 1945 Over and over againHurley cited the Strategic Bombing Survey ldquoIt is worth noting thatantifriction bearings represented an Achilles heel in the German econ-omy in World War II The Strategic Bombing Survey indicated a paral-ysis of German industry following Allied air force bombings ofSchweinfurt where more than 50 of German antifriction bearingswere producedrdquo Four H-bombs for example could wipe out half the UScapacity to produce instruments and related products ldquoUnfortunatelythe US has many Schweinfurts In the Great Lakes region are to befound 47 of the nonelectrical machinery productionrdquo A saturationattack on that regionmdashand saturation would not take many bombsmdashwould Hurley noted destroy a vast array of industries including thatof chemicals29

Throughout the 1950s the Strategic Bombing Survey remained cen-tral to thinking about nuclear warfare and the dispersion of industryHurley for example in constructing his report on American chemicalpriorities reproduced the Surveyrsquos list of the ten most vital chemicalsfor the German war effort from nitrogen methanol and calcium car-bide down to caustic soda chlorine and sodium carbonate He reca-pitulated the Surveyrsquos conclusions about the shortages of nitric acid onthe manufacture of explosives the reduction of methanol that cut intothe making of high explosives and the Germansrsquo vain last-ditch effortsto create underground factories In this new narrative Americans

Galison | War against the Center 21

played the role previously performed by Germans Russians took overthe bombing role from the Allies Those who had used their knowledgeof American industry had planned the strategic bombing of the Axisnow they became the potential bombing victims readying plans to disperse Here is Hurley

To avoid a repetition in this country of the unfortunate experi-ences of the Germans during World War II necessary moves mustbe made before any outbreak of hostilities The Germans enjoyedthe luxury of learning from their mistakes It is highly doubtfulwhether in the atomic age any nation will have the same oppor-tunitymdashone mistake may well be the last30

Dispersal could aid in reconstruction and also preventionmdasha strongernation ldquoprotected in spacerdquo (as the phrase went) would deter any attacker

Admiral Ben Moreell retired from the Navy and in the mid-1950schairman of Jones amp Laughlin Steel Corporation had just presented tothe secretary of commerce the manifesto of the purposes of the Ironand Steel Advisory Council The council had urged a mobilization planfor steel in light of the threat presented by high-speed jet airplaneslong-range missiles and nuclear weapons that ldquoour prospectiveenemyrdquo might at any time hurl without warning Big steel needed acomplete control center one linked by telegraph and radio to the steel-making plants Admiral Moreell and his fellow advisers emphasizedthe proximate danger of Russians with H-bombs and in fact asMoreell noted they had one just a few days after his committee laid itsreport at Commerce Worriedly the admiral allowed that 75 percent ofAmerican steelmaking capacity could be destroyed by a mere tenhydrogen bombs The councilrsquos recommendation disperse 25 percentof the capacity in such a way that the resulting plants would be splitup into numerous single-function plants providing each plant with atleast three alternative modes for transporting its products It was timeMoreell intoned to take similar measures in a host of other industriesincluding rubber copper glass aluminum textiles automobiles andelectrical products Prepare for real costs for steel alone the disper-sion bill would run to some $10 billion

Moreell ldquoPerhaps I have overemphasized the hazard under whichwe now live I do not believe so The facts which are coming out withrespect to the tactics and policies of the Communist enemy in Chinaand Korea added to what we already know about them justify the con-clusion that we are facing a ruthless adversary who will permit nohumane consideration to inuence his decisions who will strike with-out prior warning and whose ambition is to rule the worldrdquo31

Dispersion might help the admiral concluded Like so much of this lit-

22 Grey Room 04

Opposite top Where the steelindustry is concentrated Source Admiral Ben MoreellldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do toUS Industriesrdquo US News andWorld Report 7 May 1954

Opposite bottom Destroyingsteel Source Moreell ldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do to USIndustriesrdquo

erature issues of protability and patriotism stood side by side and heconcluded under the ag gesturing to the Founding Father ldquoIn timeof peace prepare for warrdquo

Preparations advanced In 1956 Industrial Development a nationalmagazine dedicated to ldquoarea analysis and business site selectionrdquoreported that the Ofce of Area Development had reviewed and approvedsome fty-eight of the self-prepared urban area surveys Money talkedBy mid-June 1955 projects valued at $30 billion had qualied for taxabatements under the program

Take Milwaukee In December 1953 the cityrsquos mayor Frank Zeidlertraveled to the White House where the president addressed some twohundred large-city mayors in stark terms ldquoFor the rst time in historycities have become principal targets for an enemy seeking to conquerour nation The city has moved from a position of support in the rear Ithas moved out into the front linerdquo Immediately Zeidler arrangedto meet with the Wisconsin governor and the mayors of RacineMadison and Green Joining the chorus of civil defense authorities themayors agreed that in the short term they would need plans for rapidevacuation in the event of a nuclear attack at the same time theyneeded to begin longer-term planning for the dispersal of the city By

Galison | War against the Center 23

May 1954 Milwaukee had its report ldquoNew building in the core of anurban target [ought to] be prohibited except when it replaces existingstructures This is intended to halt the pouring of greater target valuesinto areas which are already richly rewarding as targetsrdquo Spreadingindustry wasnrsquot all that the report advocated The new region wouldneed new school districts novel tax structures and alternative typesof local governments Zoning would force dispersal from the centerinstitute bands of open space and deliver industrial plants to hinter-lands deliberately bypassed by major radial or circumferential roads inorder to avoid creating secondary concentrations ldquoThere is little doubtrdquothe reportrsquos author reckoned ldquothat some of [these] measures wouldhave to be fought through the Supreme Court before they were acceptedby allrdquo32 Pressed by national codes taxes defense spending andimprecations by the president on down local and federal authoritiescompeted to outdo the other in the rush away from the targeted center

America was not alone in declaring war on the urban center Canadain the midst of a major effort to plan urban growth in 1956 also begandefensive dispersal The Ofce of the Civil Defence Coordinator in col-laboration with the Defence Research Board and McGill Universityprepared a Guide to Urban Dispersal ldquoDispersal is the characteristicof present day urban growthrdquo the authors asserted Satellite towns andvillages made urban regions the right scale on which to re-think pat-terns of communication government and demography ldquoDefence iscritical In modern warfare the initial blow is struck at the civilian pop-ulation to destroy at a stroke the ability to resist The greatest vulnera-bility lies in urban concentrationmdashthe greatest security would beachieved by urban dispersalrdquo That dispersal would follow a survey ofa ring located an H-bomb radius away from the regional center That is

24 Grey Room 04

where the Guide came in Based in part on a real area and in part ongeneric characteristics the book was a how-to manual for planning thescattering of the urban into the regional Slope of the land location ofwater avenues of communication and transport needs all had to bereckoned The Guide instructed local leaders and planners how to dia-gram all this for their future Satellite towns would perch outside thering of safetymdashtowns that under no circumstances ought to attractmore than forty thousand inhabitants Ultimately government-pro-pelled ldquourban regionsrdquo would replace the ldquoamorphous formrdquo of currentmetropolitan development alleviating social and economic problemswhile securing spatial defense against thermonuclear attack33 City bycity country by country the bomb helped drive dispersion Indeedcoming full circle the Germans already all too familiar with aerialbombardment began preparing for a rain of hydrogen bombsHannover Bremen and Duumlsseldorf issued the rst three analyses andothers would follow Their comprehensive treatments covered the sta-tus of police re hospital postal service and road service followinga nuclear attack34

Preparation for atomic war was certainly on President Dwight DEisenhowerrsquos mind as he strove to resuscitate the long-debated federalhighway system Franklin D Roosevelt had pushed the idea in the1930s not least for its promise of providing jobs Reports rolled in TheBureau of Public Roads undertook one in 1938 and the chairman ofthat organization presided over another called Interregional Highwaysdated 1943 Other reports and standards marched on through the warwith some actually leading to road buildingmdashin 1947 crews began cut-ting the rst miles of interstate highways Still by the time Eisenhowercame into office in January 1953 there were but six thousand or somiles of road improvements actually on the ground (at a cost of nearly$1 billion)

Eisenhower liked highways He had struggled across the country ina motorized convoy back in 1919 an unpleasant sixty-two days of slip-ping on ice sticking in mud breaking into wooden bridges and freez-ing under snow The contrast with Germany was stark As SupremeCommander General Eisenhower had been astonished by the auto-bahns taking particular note of the advantages that road system affordedas he had to move masses of men and mateacuteriel across the conqueredReich ldquoGermany made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons acrossthe landrdquo On July 12 1954 Vice President Richard Nixon facing theconference of state governors at Lake George New York read fromEisenhowerrsquos prepared speech and the message was clear The obso-lete network had to go its antiquated byways were clogging the roadsand courts while leaving a death toll on the citizenry comparable to

Galison | War against the Center 25

Industrial dispersal 1956 Solidcircles show cities where dispersalplans were approved by late 1955dotted circles indicate communi-ties where plans were under prepa-ration Source Theodore K PasmaldquoIndustrial Dispersal 1956rdquo Indus-trial Development The NationalMagazine of Area Analysis andBusiness Site Selection (January-February 1956)

ldquoa bloody warrdquo But Eisenhowerrsquos final jab at the current system wasstark holding up for public contemplation its ldquoappalling inadequaciesto meet the demands of catastrophe or defense should an atomic warcomerdquo35 Radial roads would afford clear routes for city evacuationCircumferential roads Project East River had recommended back in1952 should be encouraged wherever possible to drain industry andpopulation from the dense city centers36 In fact highway designersconsulted with federal civil defense agencies and military plannersaimed for interstate highways that would bypass urban areas to avoidldquoroute[s] that had suffered a direct A-bomb hitrdquo37 It took two years ofpolitical wrangling and it goes without saying that economic housingand non-nuclear forces for the interstate were surely among its powerfulmotors By the end of 1956 the Interstate and Defense Highway Systemhad fundingmdashsome $25 billion of federal support38

3 Distributed KnowledgeBy 1960 the Air Force began dreaming worse nightmares than nuke-ladenbombers bullying their way past ghter defense Atomic strikes againstthe continental United States could be launched with missiles forwhich range of ight was no longer an issue The RAND Corporationmade its mark with contracts to think about this thermonuclear threatfrom the new think tank issued shelves of studies including thefamous (and famously parodied) volume by Herman Kahn On Thermo-nuclear War Just as Kahn stepped into the limelight the much lesswell known Paul Baran an electrical engineer coming from HughesAircraft Companyrsquos systems group joined RAND His job was todevelop a scheme that would ensure the survival of the US telecom-munications infrastructure through a Russian rst strikemdasha vital linknot only for domestic communication but also for command and con-trol His response in a series of papers launched in 1960 was a plan toremove completely critical nodes from the telephone system Like thethree highways many wanted from each dispersed defense plantBaranrsquos vision aimed for safety in redundantly connected spatially dis-tributed mini-centers

Here is how Baran put it in one of his rst papers

The cloud-of-doom attitude that nuclear war spells the end of theearth is slowly lifting from the minds of the many Better quanti-tative estimates of post-attack destruction together with a lessemotional discussion of the alternatives may mark the end of theldquowhat the hellmdashwhatrsquos the userdquo era A new view emerges the pos-sibility of a war exists but there is much that can be done to min-imize the consequences

26 Grey Room 04

De nition of redundancy Paul Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunications I Introductionto Distributed CommunicationsNetworkrdquo RAND Corporationmemorandum RM-3420-PRAugust 1964

Survivable atomic warmdashthe goal of the fteen-year struggle since theSurvey crew picked through the still radioactive rubble at HiroshimaBaran again

If war does not mean the end of the earth in a black and whitemanner then it follows that we should do those things that makethe shade of gray as light as possible to plan now to minimizepotential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permitthe survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstructthe economy swiftly39

That reconstruction demanded the elimination of the hierarchical center alternately referred to over these rst decades of the cold war asthe linchpin the bottleneck and the node

The problem as Baran formulated it did involve new equipment tolabel digitally each packet of information with a ldquotordquo and ldquofromrdquo andthen to route these fragments over diverse paths toward their eventualreassembly on arrival But before anything could be built moved dig-itized or reinforced the conceptual problem required attention Thatreconceptualization now took as it had not before a mathematicalform If nodes were replaced with redundant links how could heexploit the information-theoretic approach of Claude Shannon to countthe surviving paths between points in the array

Here is how Baran reasoned

Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network whichwill allow several hundred major communications stations to talkwith one another after an enemy attack As a criterion of surviv-ability we elect to use the percentage of stations both survivingthe physical attack and remaining in electrical connection withthe largest single group of surviving stations This criterion ischosen as a conservative measure of the ability of the survivingstations to operate together as a coherent entity after the attack40

With the result that a redundancy of at least R = 3would ensure a likely survival rate of nearly 75 percentBaran could now sketch the distributed system thatwould vouchsafe communication after nuclear war

Worst obviously was the centralized node that rep-resented the single critical target This was the situationwith concentrated steel electricity or oil plants it wasthe structure of the hubbed railway system It was inshort the bombing plannerrsquos dream and the bombingvictimrsquos nightmare Decentralized nodes that main-tained a local hierarchical structure were clearly better

Galison | War against the Center 27

a complete grid structure was best of all To a certain extent such gridsstood for the defensive ideal of dispersion more generally By increasingthe number of targets one decreased the likelihood of incapacitationHalting abortive and awkward though it was Baranrsquos scheme (alongwith a similar one developed in England) slowly wended its way throughdifferent incarnations in the ARPANET and Milnet But the elusivegoal all through these decades of distributed communication was a dis-tributed grid or mesh a thrust in the rst instance aimed at removingthe critical node Though in the garb of nuclear survivability the gridmay not appear as the redemptive Internet of our dreams that tech-nology grew directly out of fifteen years of longing for a world stillstanding after thermonuclear war41

4 We Are Become TargetsDuring the years of World War II American and British planners andanalysts learned to see through a bombsight Not in a single glimpsebut in the routine killings and losses that accompanied ever more fre-quently repeated raids Twenty-four hours a day day after day monthafter month year after year the planners and analysts studied andrestudied the interdependencies of the German economy circled tar-gets blasted factories leveled cities analyzed the damage and struckagain Chemicals nitric acid methanol Basic materials rubber steeloil aviation gas Transport systems electrical generators And popula-tion centers area bombing by the combined American and Britishforces killed some 600000 Germans In a war that the Nazis renderedever more vicious even as their defeat seemed inevitable the Americansrsquoearly dreams of precision bombing went by the way Two hundredplanes over Schweinfurt then four hundred but also Hamburg LuumlbeckMuumlnster Berlin Dresden Regensburg year after year Measuring bombloads accuracies reconstruction time 35 ton of bombs per acre toinduce damage of 8 percent delay time for reconstruction two and a

28 Grey Room 04

half months A calculus of fractions probabilities delaysBy the warrsquos end a new category of analyst had come into existence

more often than not social scientists and industrialists but also human-ists diplomats mathematicians and natural scientists Piecing togetherfragments of intelligence examining reconnaissance photographs theypainted an elaborate portrait of a wartime foe By warrsquos end the Surveyanalysts had come to see German and Japanese cities through what onemight call a ldquodestructive functionalismrdquo dependencies leading back-ward they kept hoping to the ever-elusive linchpin that when pulledwould topple the structure Schweinfurt was supposed to be one suchpoint with its all-important bearing factories And after Schweinfurtthere were other ldquobottlenecksrdquo to be targeted other cities other plantsother transshipment points

Perhaps before Hiroshima the bombsight eye had already begun toreect back I donrsquot know But in the atomic rubble as the analysts inter-viewed hundreds of blast survivors and canvassed the broken struc-tures as they methodically noted which kinds of concrete walls stillstood at various radii of destruction they began quite explicitly to seethemselves to see America through the bombardierrsquos eye They beganto wonder what an American city would look like after the bomb hadfallen Returning to the United States and publishing their StrategicBombing Survey things began to look different They began to see them-selves their towns and factories on the crosshairs of radial targetingmaps Far from a technological determinism the all-too material tech-nologies and concepts of self were fully imbricated

One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics launched when NorbertWiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedbackmachine that could be mimicked electronically from there it was a shortstep to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way Then humanphysiology began to appear as a cybernetic system then the humanmind then life then even the world system as a whole42 Somewherein the midst of total war a technocratic vision of a technical EnemyOther rose to become a vision of ourselves It was but a heartbeat beforecybernetics saturated the writings of Gregory Bateson and MargaretMead not to speak of philosophers planners and architects

But the consequence was this Three years before the Russians hadthe bomb in fact before on just about anyonersquos account the cold warhad begun American analysts were already advocating a massive dis-persion of factories and populations against atomic aerial attack

As the cold war arms race accelerated the search for ldquodefense in spacerdquogrew more desperate jet bombers atomic bombs hydrogen bombsintercontinental ballistic missiles With each step more frantic urgingto spread the cities into their ldquomarketing areasrdquo Highway systems

Galison | War against the Center 29

Centralized decentralized and distributed networksSource Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

economic effects) George Ball (transportation) and Paul Nitze (equipmentand utilities)4 Starting on the lower rungs of the ladder were Marxisteconomist Paul Baran and poet W H Auden5

One of the rst targets was the Luftwaffe itself a task in destructionthat the Army Air Force aimed to complete by pulverizing airframe fac-tories This proved vastly more difcult than the Allies expected Afterdismissing the Versailles agreement forbidding the construction of airpower the Nazi regime hammered into place a German air forceproofed as far as possible against enemy attack Emphasizing protec-tion for their factories against air raids the Luftwaffe planners sited newplants away from frontiers in suburban or country districts concealingstructures deploying camouage separating buildings within the plantsand providing on-site air raid shelters for workers The Reich pooledpatents and structured the airframe ldquocomplexrdquo so that spatially separatedplants could stamp out replaceable segments of their completed prod-uct It was an efcient powerful apparatus that as the Survey promptlyconceded continued to produce an abundance of ghters and bomberseven under the years-long rain of explosives6

Responding to some fourteen attacks on the German aircraft industrybetween July and December 1943 the Germans dispersed their facto-ries as rapidly as they could For example initial American and Britishattacks against the Focke-Wulf plant at Bremen and the Heinkel plant atRostock were not very successful worse for the Allies the bomb runsled the German authorities to splinter Focke-Wulf production from the heartland in Bremen into East Prussia and Poland Not only did this dispersal open new forced labor supplies to the Nazis but it would also the Germans believed put the plants out of harmrsquos rangeLarge-scale dispersion began during the Allied assault of the secondhalf of 1943 and compulsory dispersion took hold in February 19447

Galison | War against the Center 9

To realize these goals Albert Speerrsquos assistant Karl-Otto Saur createda vast ldquoghter staffrdquo from which one member was dispatched perma-nently to every airframe factory in the Reich even as the fighter staffpartitioned the factories into hundreds of sites many of which stood inforest clearings8 Acknowledging the success of the dispersal programthe Strategic Bombing Survey allowed that Nazi airframe productionactually increased during 1944 They concluded that Germany lostcontrol of the air not by a lack of planes but by the shortage of well-trained pilots and aviation fuel

But the operations analysts selecting targets were not just after par-ticular pieces of munitions factories their goal was to precipitate a col-lapse of the German economy as a whole To that end they directed aseries of studies designed to locate just those plants where destructionwould cause shortages to ripple through the entire system Operationsfollowed Henry ldquoHaprdquo Arnold for example tempted Harry Hopkinswith the notion that blasting the German ball bearing industry ldquowouldprobably wreck all German industryrdquo9

At the top of the Alliesrsquo bombing priority list stood ball bearingswithout which they reckoned German machinery would quite literallygrind to a halt As the authors of the Strategic Bombing Survey put it

On the afternoon of the 17th of August 1943 some 200 FlyingFortresses flying from their bases in England deep into Bavariaand unescorted after reaching the German border struck the rstgreat blow aimed at the complete destruction of an entire andessential segment of the German war economy10

Some 52 percent of German bearing production lay in an enormousfactory complex at Schweinfurt US Army Air Force planes hit the

10 Grey Room 04

city with some four hundred tons of bombs while the Germans struckdown thirty-six of the attackers The raids continued with some eleventhousand tons of bombs dropped the most destructive of which tookplace on 14 October 1943 Again over two hundred planes descendedon the plant letting loose 450 tons of high explosives and incendiariesdestroying 10 percent of the machinery 20 percent of the stock and350000 square feet of plant German antindashaircraft batteries and ghtersshot down an even greater number of planes than on the earlier bigraid killing some six hundred airmen As a direct result of that attackSpeer near panic put his closest associate Philip Kessler in charge ofprotecting and dispersing the bearing industry By August 1944 whenthe Allies ew an eight-hundred-plane raid against Schweinfurt half thefactory was elsewhere11 Having faced this barrage the Germans braggedat warrsquos end ldquoEs ist kein Geraet zurueck geblieben weil Waelzlagerfehltenrdquo (No equipment was left behind because bearings were lacking)American analysts ought to take the lesson to heart the authors of theStrategic Bombing Survey insisted ldquoeven in the case of a very concen-trated industry very heavy and continuous attack must be made sinceotherwise the enemy if he can survive the initial shock will be able totake successful countermeasuresrdquo12

These target categories airframes and bearings were supposed tohave choked the German war-making capacity Both after a frantic dis-persal lost the vulnerability that the Americans expected Consequentlystarting in spring 1944 Allied strategy broadened in large measurebecause by then they had air superiority over the entirety of GermanyPlanners began to plot two new ldquobottlenecksrdquo to squeeze shut First theoperations analysts began directing airplanes against the synthetic oilindustrymdashthat is oil produced with the massive coal deposits of the

Ruhr They hit the steel industry hard anddrove massive missions against chemicalplants By doing so they aimed simultane-ously to damage the German home economyand to cripple rolling armor at the front

While reporting successful ldquobottleneckrdquoattacks such as the campaign against oil thereport itself was in essence doing its ownreconstruction of the German economymdashand its authors did not hesitate to point outwhere the original planners had failed tofind a vulnerable point For example theylamented that the combined Allied air forceslet loose only 05 percent of their bomb loadon the electrical industry even though the

Galison | War against the Center 11

Opposite Bombs dropped on German bearing targetsSource USSBS

Left German crude steel production Source USSBS

Germans themselves (as Speer later asserted) were terried of an engulf-ing Allied drive against German generating stations Power plants wereconcentrated in a limited number of locations generators could notstockpile their electrical product and the Germans had a terrible timerepairing damaged power stations Perusing captured documents theStrategic Bombing Survey authors reported

The secret minutes of the central planning committee studyingthe power shortage make this weakness clear The difculties ofadding capacity the limitations of the so-called grid system therelationship of curtailment and shortage of electric energy to pro-duction losses in industry and their fears that their extreme vul-nerability would be discovered are all paraded openly in theseminutes made by the Germans in the midst of the war13

Hitting forty-ve plants would have been dangerous for Germany as awholemdasha result they justified by testimony from Speer himself Andthese plants unlike much else could not be dispersed Similarly ldquoamajor opportunity in the Allied air offensive against oil was unexploitedrdquoin that the production of ethyl uid was crucial for aviation fuel andethyl uid required tertraethyl lead There were only two tetraethyl leadplants in Germany These the report insisted should have been hit14

Or again ldquoconcentration on the few synthetic rubber plants as a primarybombing target early in the war would have proven protablerdquo15

Again and again the bomb analysts repeated their message Aerialwarfare worked when it hit concentrated centralized production stand-ing at a functional node upstream of many other industries Bombingfailed when the Germans effectively dispersed their factories Separa-tion in space worked exceedingly well in other sectors Beginning in1934 the Nazis had already scattered their explosive and propellantplants but only in 1944 had they launched (rather unsuccessful)attempts to decentralize plants producing nitrogen (needed for gun-powder) and methanol (crucial for high explosives)16 Similarly Speerand his most valued lieutenant Edmund Geilenberg scrambled des-perately in the nal months of the war to disperse J-2 jet fuel for theirlast-ditch attempt to stem air losses with their new wonder weaponthe jet ghter

2 The Bombsight MirrorWhile they were assessing the air war against Nazi Germany theStrategic Bombing Survey analysts had under way a massive inquiryinto the assault on Japan Without reviewing the bulk of their study ofconventional bombing I want to turn to the report they led on the atomicattacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki That text chronicles the horrific

12 Grey Room 04

effects of the blast separately and methodically outlining its effect onbuildings and bodies by pressure heat and radiation Taking the testi-mony of hundreds of survivors the analysts asked about morale inquiredabout feelings of rebellion toward the government about attitudestoward the United States The bomb surveyors even if briey exploredthe effect of the nuclear devastation on internal high-level Japanesedeliberations about the future of the war

Suddenly in the concluding section of the report the authors took adifferent tack and the tone changed Gone was the absolute distancethe surveyors had managed to maintain toward industrial targets citiesand military objectives All at once the weapons dropped on an enemyjust months before began to appear in an inverted vision in which thosesame weapons appeared turned against the United States

The Surveyrsquos investigators as they proceeded about their studyfound an insistent question framing itself in their minds ldquoWhat ifthe target for the bomb had been an American cityrdquo True the pri-mary mission of the Survey was to ascertain the facts just sum-marized But conclusions as to the meaning of those facts forcitizens of the United States forced themselves almost inescapablyon the men who examined thoughtfully the remains of Hiroshimaand Nagasaki17

Sifting the rubble interviewing the wounded survivors the BombingSurvey investigators began to see similarities between Japanese build-ings and American ones between surviving structures at Hiroshimaand possible shelters in the United States They made it clear in printthat they thought the two nuclear-devastated sites were the best argu-ment against war itself but they also began to speculate on howAmericans might survive the kinds of attacks they themselves had justvisited on the Japanese

The fate of industries in both cities again illustrates the value ofdecentralization All major factories in Hiroshima were on theperiphery of the citymdashand escaped serious damage at Nagasakiplants and dockyards at the southern end of the city were merelyintact but those in the valley where the bomb exploded wereseriously damaged18

Medical facilities typically located in the central parts of the cities lay in smoldering ruins So it had been in Hamburg where survivors of theraids had lain in shock without assistance in their hours of greatest need

Looking at Hiroshima Nagasaki and Hamburg Survey personnelbegan to see their own large cities Already in 1946 they pressed for adramatic shift in the way those cities were conceived

Galison | War against the Center 13

The similar peril of American cities and the extent to which wisezoning has diminished it differ from city to city Though a reshap-ing and partial dispersal of the national centers of activity aredrastic and difcult measures they represent a social and mili-tary ideal toward which very practical steps can be taken once thepolicy has been laid down19

Efforts toward decentralization remained desultory during 1947But already Congress had ordered the National Security ResourcesBoard to begin exploring industrial relocation Abruptly in the sum-mer of 1949 the laissez-faire mood ended For it was in August that theRussians detonated their rst atomic bomb named by the West Joe 1Despite nearly four years of warning that the Russians would probablyhave nuclear weapons within five years of the Trinity test Americanpolicy experts politicians military officers and atomic scientistsreacted with an alarm bordering on panic Called to offer a response tothe Russian bomb in October 1949 the General Advisory Committee(GAC) under J Robert Oppenheimer convened only to harden theirresistance to further escalation of the arms race In a surprising andunanimous vote the GAC recommended against building the hydrogenbomb on moral grounds A weapon of genocide they asserted an ldquoevilunder lightrdquo It was that anti-H-bomb decision soon ratied by the AtomicEnergy Commissioners that sent a ssure straight down the center of acommunity of scientists grown close-knit during the war

The GACrsquos H-bomb report catalyzed a swift hard struggle betweenopponents and proponents of this new category of weapon Lobbyingbegan in secretmdashand then burst into the public arena after a congressionalleak Editorials in newspapers magazines and television erupted onboth sides with debate continuing all the way up to President Harry S Trumanrsquos decision in January 1950 The country would in fact buildthe hydrogen bomb In June 1950 the Korean War beganmdashmobilizationindustrial and military heightened as never before and the govern-ment inaugurated a still-continuing national commitment to a hugemilitary establishment

It was in this context that in August 1951 the president announceda national policy for industrial dispersion and the National SecurityResources Board quickly followed with a booklet entitled Is Your Planta Target that proclaimed ldquoThe risk of an all-out atomic attack on theUnited States grows greater each day since we are no longer the solepossessor of the secret of the atomic bomb This means that no indus-trial area in the Nation can be considered safe from attackrdquo20 To guar-antee survival the National Security Resources Board insisted wouldrequire that productive capacity be protected ldquoThe dispersion (or

14 Grey Room 04

Site selection for securitySource Industrial DispersionNational Security ResourcesBoard Is Your Plant a Target(Washington DC US Govern-ment Printing Of ce 1951)

deployment in space) of new plant development for war-supportingindustries can make American production less vulnerable to attackrdquoSpace could protect men at the battleeld the authors continued andspace by multiplying targets would diminish ldquothe vulnerability of anyone concentrationrdquo

Behind this national program lay four principles First the disper-sion would be of new industries rather than old second ldquono region ofthe country is to be built up at the expense of anotherrdquo third the dis-persion would take place within so-called ldquomarketing areasrdquo and fourthstate and local governments with private industry would initiate thechange and the federal government would encourage and providetechnical guidance

To tempt industrialists the Feds advertised additional benets thatwould accrue to those industries that dispersed better working andliving conditions for workers greater production by avoiding urbancongestion a healthier more stable economy Adding further quitematerial sweeteners to the mix the federal government promised toallocate ldquocerticates of necessityrdquo critical materials emergency loansand defense contracts to those industries that escaped the connes ofurban concentration Reading the booklet the industrialist and thecivic leader could begin asking themselves these questions

The handy cow pasture on the edge of town may look like a goodsite but does it measure up to the all-important security stan-dards Is it strategically located in relation to labor supply fueltransportation and other requirements for efcient and econom-

Galison | War against the Center 15

ical production Is the site properly located in relation to futurehomes shops schools and other community developments Hasfull consideration been given to efcient wartime productionand long-term benets to industry and community When youhave answered these questions you are on the way to developinga sound industrial dispersion program21

Industrialists swarmed toward Washington to assess the new plansGathered under the auspices of the Executive Ofce of the President

the National Security Resources Board assembled the key players on 7September 1951 in the Executive Ofce Building in Washington DC

Jack Small chairman of the Munitions Board told the assembledthat he was more scared now than when he came down to Washingtonsome nine months earlier

In the intervening time that God has given us we have madeprogress in the production of weapons getting new weaponsmade and creating a force strength but we are not yet ready andwe are in really desperate danger in the event that our enemyattacks For Godrsquos sake donrsquot get the idea that this thing isover or that the danger has nished or that these fanatic enemiesof ours have changed their plans or objectives one iota Theyhave not We will have achieved by next year a posture ofmore strength but still it will not be enough strength to pre-vent aggression

The ldquoall-outrdquo could come at any moment Small insisted to the indus-trialists and it could come by intention or by accident There was onlyone hope ldquoSpace is the one thing that really worksrdquo22

Soon however the discussion turned away from plutonium andtoward prots How queried the representatives from Alabama andLouisiana might this dispersion bring industry to their areas and awayfrom the Northeast which already had such access to the federal silverspoon Industrialists wondered aloud how much federal force-feedingthere would be and the ofcials reassured them that they intended inno way to damage business interests lower productivity or threaten a lossof labor supply This was to be dispersion within a marketing areamdashnot wholesale relocation to distant states

Small and his colleagues in dispersion left the audience withsomewhat vague injunctions But the national policy did vastly moreit aimed to make citizens of every community into target analysts oftheir own region As the Bureau of Commerce patiently explainedldquomaterials and methods for identifying the potential target areas aredescribed on the following pagesrdquo23 Those ldquopotential target areasrdquo

16 Grey Room 04

were the cities and towns of the United States Here is how the Commerce Department directed every community

but especially the top 168 metropolitan areas to proceed First checkthe list of industrial classifications and identify all those plantsemploying more than one hundred workers per peak shift These ranfrom industrial inorganic chemicals coke and byproducts to steelmills engines aircraft scientific instruments photographic equip-ment and ordnance Then identify those locations on a map (naturallynot disclosing the precise role of any single plant to unwanted eyes)Combine this information with outlines of heavily populated sectionsfollowing the information of the Census Bureau Lay out two largemaps (one inch equals one mile) showing political subdivisions arterialhighways railroads ports and harbors alongside industrial areas Nextdraw a series of four-inch (four-mile) circles on transparent overlaysmdashthese correspond to the area destroyed by an atomic bomb

Now you are ready to identify your regionrsquos target zones ldquothose areasthat contain sufcient concentrations of industry or population so asto constitute attractive atom-bomb targetsrdquo24 Just ldquoattractive atom-bombtargetsrdquo not sites ldquolikely to be targeted by the Russiansrdquomdashthe reifiedshorthand compresses all those years of wartime and then postwar tar-geting Your goal in what follows is to use these circles to form a targetout of the city as a whole by transecting the four-mile-diameter circlesonce they are judiciously located In particular the full target will contain both valuable defense-related industries (employing 16000workers in toto) or a residential population of 200000 people

Here is the schematic procedureThis region outlined by the dark line encloses the ldquohighly indus-

trialized sectionrdquo as defined by the National Industrial DispersionProgram Next each community is to plot the census tracts on the sec-ond set of working maps At the center of each tract goes a dot and thepopulation Again you overlay a four-mile transparent circle movingit until it circles a population of 200000 When you connect the centersof these 200000-person circles you have formed a ldquodensely populatedsectionrdquo Next join the two maps in such a way as to form a combinedarea embracing the high density of regions of both industry and popu-lation This joint region the Commerce Department declared wouldbe known as a potential A-bomb target zone From that zone measureten inches (ten miles) out to form the dispersal limit line There is yourgoal Locate all future critical industry and its associated populationspast the line of safety taking care not to create inadvertently a secondarypotential A-bomb target zone

These maps were not designed just to scare they would form witha factory proposal an application for a ldquocerticate of necessityrdquo (granting

Galison | War against the Center 17

18 Grey Room 04

Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo

Boundary of highly industrial ized section

Census-tract population centers with population gures

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of highly industrialized section

Galison | War against the Center 19

Top row left to right Self-targeting step I Take the listof government designated defense-related industries and plot theirlocation and employment This isthe rst task towards the construc-tion of areas known as the highlyindustrialized sections Source USDepartment of Commerce Indus-trial Dispersion Guidebook forCommunities Domestic CommerceSeries no 31 (Washington DCUS Government Printing Of ce1952)

Self-targeting step II To completethe construction of the perimeterof the highly industrialized sectionsdraw circles of four-mile radiusconnect centers of circles contain-ing more than 16000 workersSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step III Label populations from census tractsSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Bottom row left to right Self-targeting step IV To completethe construction of the denselypopulated sections draw circles offour-mile radius and connect thecenters of circles with more than200000 inhabitants SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Self-targeting step V Now super-impose the highly industrializedarea on the densely populatedarea Taken together they form the potential A-bomb Target zoneSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step VI Drawingthe potential A-bomb target zoneon a regional map planners shouldnow construct a safety margin often miles from the outside of theendangered area All new industrialplants should be dispersed out-side this ten-mile radius SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Census-tract population centers with population gures

accelerated tax amortization) facilitating the approval of defense loansand securing defense contracts

Bombing the Axis economy and dispersing the American one werereflections of one another When Charles E Wilson director of theOffice of Defense Mobilization came before the National SecurityResources Board of the Presidentrsquos Executive Office he needed anexpert on how to disperse industry To the captains of industry assem-bled for a 1951 hearing Wilson sought to justify his strictures aboutsplitting plants by ten or twenty miles ldquoMr Gorrie brought me a realexpert on that I call him a real expert because he was one of the menwho had done bombing in the industrial arena of Germany and cer-tainly he convinced me that 10 or 20 miles provides reasonable safetyrdquo25

Bombers braced for bombsIn 1952 Project East River (Associated Universities contracted to the

federal government) reported on how Washington could drive indus-try outside the expanding urban areas ldquoleapfroggingrdquo away from urbancores One role was to create ldquopublic understandingrdquo of the need forldquosatellite townrdquo planning and its defense use More materially theEast River gang reported the federal government should provide aidto assist in the construction of urban arteries to the satellite towns pro-vide rent subsidies to small businesses send appropriations to matchmetropolitan planning units offer tax assistance for new constructionin outlying areas demand dispersal to qualify for federal defenseinsurance and promote federal loans and grants for the constructionof outlying schools streets water and sewers The government shouldsubsidize ring roads around citiesmdashlike Route 128 around Bostonmdashand strive to locate defense industry on it Above all the fast-increas-ing population ofce building and industry heading into cities had tobe reversed Throughout constant vigilance against the re-creation ofnew centers26

Eponymously the report took as its ldquoarea studyrdquo the imagined caseof a Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapon detonated several thousand feetabove a 260-acre rectangle in Manhattan adjacent to the East RiverWith detailed information about the age structure and flammabilityof individual buildingsmdashand recent census datamdashthis not-so-typicalpiece of America could then be tracked as it shattered and burnedunder the assault of nuclear attack How many of the 35000 peopleresiding between 59th and 72nd Streets (between 3rd Avenue and theriver) would become casualties if a weapon were to be exploded at 2 AM How many minutesrsquo warning would they have to take shelterHow much radiation would they receive Would a firestorm eruptBased principally on the results of the US Strategic Bombing Surveyon Hiroshima and Nagasaki this report was in a sense a dully terrifying

20 Grey Room 04

answer to the question the Bombing Survey had posed seven years earlier What would the bombs that were let loose over Hiroshima havelooked like were they to have been dropped back home27

Under the guidance of these various boards and the lucrative drawof taxes loans and contracts one by one key industrial and civic leaderslearned to see themselves through the reflection of a bombsight Oneby one they began plotting their own dispersion In September 1955for example the Chemical and Engineering News reported on atomicvulnerability in the chemical process industry Nuclear weapons jetairplanes and the concept of total war combined wrote Neil P HurleySJ to blur the distinction between military force and industrial poten-tial The role of an industrymdashits functional interdependence on otherindustriesmdashxed the likelihood of its plants becoming targets Chemical-process industries were vulnerable on two fronts geographic concen-tration and functional criticality The conclusion was as inevitable asit was fearsome ldquoThree well-directed H-bombs on these key targetareas would have serious consequences for the industrial chemicalproducing complexrdquo28 Two-thirds of workers making industrial chem-icals lived in ten states

American chemical dispersion in 1955 was directly and explicitlylinked to German chemical dispersion in 1945 Over and over againHurley cited the Strategic Bombing Survey ldquoIt is worth noting thatantifriction bearings represented an Achilles heel in the German econ-omy in World War II The Strategic Bombing Survey indicated a paral-ysis of German industry following Allied air force bombings ofSchweinfurt where more than 50 of German antifriction bearingswere producedrdquo Four H-bombs for example could wipe out half the UScapacity to produce instruments and related products ldquoUnfortunatelythe US has many Schweinfurts In the Great Lakes region are to befound 47 of the nonelectrical machinery productionrdquo A saturationattack on that regionmdashand saturation would not take many bombsmdashwould Hurley noted destroy a vast array of industries including thatof chemicals29

Throughout the 1950s the Strategic Bombing Survey remained cen-tral to thinking about nuclear warfare and the dispersion of industryHurley for example in constructing his report on American chemicalpriorities reproduced the Surveyrsquos list of the ten most vital chemicalsfor the German war effort from nitrogen methanol and calcium car-bide down to caustic soda chlorine and sodium carbonate He reca-pitulated the Surveyrsquos conclusions about the shortages of nitric acid onthe manufacture of explosives the reduction of methanol that cut intothe making of high explosives and the Germansrsquo vain last-ditch effortsto create underground factories In this new narrative Americans

Galison | War against the Center 21

played the role previously performed by Germans Russians took overthe bombing role from the Allies Those who had used their knowledgeof American industry had planned the strategic bombing of the Axisnow they became the potential bombing victims readying plans to disperse Here is Hurley

To avoid a repetition in this country of the unfortunate experi-ences of the Germans during World War II necessary moves mustbe made before any outbreak of hostilities The Germans enjoyedthe luxury of learning from their mistakes It is highly doubtfulwhether in the atomic age any nation will have the same oppor-tunitymdashone mistake may well be the last30

Dispersal could aid in reconstruction and also preventionmdasha strongernation ldquoprotected in spacerdquo (as the phrase went) would deter any attacker

Admiral Ben Moreell retired from the Navy and in the mid-1950schairman of Jones amp Laughlin Steel Corporation had just presented tothe secretary of commerce the manifesto of the purposes of the Ironand Steel Advisory Council The council had urged a mobilization planfor steel in light of the threat presented by high-speed jet airplaneslong-range missiles and nuclear weapons that ldquoour prospectiveenemyrdquo might at any time hurl without warning Big steel needed acomplete control center one linked by telegraph and radio to the steel-making plants Admiral Moreell and his fellow advisers emphasizedthe proximate danger of Russians with H-bombs and in fact asMoreell noted they had one just a few days after his committee laid itsreport at Commerce Worriedly the admiral allowed that 75 percent ofAmerican steelmaking capacity could be destroyed by a mere tenhydrogen bombs The councilrsquos recommendation disperse 25 percentof the capacity in such a way that the resulting plants would be splitup into numerous single-function plants providing each plant with atleast three alternative modes for transporting its products It was timeMoreell intoned to take similar measures in a host of other industriesincluding rubber copper glass aluminum textiles automobiles andelectrical products Prepare for real costs for steel alone the disper-sion bill would run to some $10 billion

Moreell ldquoPerhaps I have overemphasized the hazard under whichwe now live I do not believe so The facts which are coming out withrespect to the tactics and policies of the Communist enemy in Chinaand Korea added to what we already know about them justify the con-clusion that we are facing a ruthless adversary who will permit nohumane consideration to inuence his decisions who will strike with-out prior warning and whose ambition is to rule the worldrdquo31

Dispersion might help the admiral concluded Like so much of this lit-

22 Grey Room 04

Opposite top Where the steelindustry is concentrated Source Admiral Ben MoreellldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do toUS Industriesrdquo US News andWorld Report 7 May 1954

Opposite bottom Destroyingsteel Source Moreell ldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do to USIndustriesrdquo

erature issues of protability and patriotism stood side by side and heconcluded under the ag gesturing to the Founding Father ldquoIn timeof peace prepare for warrdquo

Preparations advanced In 1956 Industrial Development a nationalmagazine dedicated to ldquoarea analysis and business site selectionrdquoreported that the Ofce of Area Development had reviewed and approvedsome fty-eight of the self-prepared urban area surveys Money talkedBy mid-June 1955 projects valued at $30 billion had qualied for taxabatements under the program

Take Milwaukee In December 1953 the cityrsquos mayor Frank Zeidlertraveled to the White House where the president addressed some twohundred large-city mayors in stark terms ldquoFor the rst time in historycities have become principal targets for an enemy seeking to conquerour nation The city has moved from a position of support in the rear Ithas moved out into the front linerdquo Immediately Zeidler arrangedto meet with the Wisconsin governor and the mayors of RacineMadison and Green Joining the chorus of civil defense authorities themayors agreed that in the short term they would need plans for rapidevacuation in the event of a nuclear attack at the same time theyneeded to begin longer-term planning for the dispersal of the city By

Galison | War against the Center 23

May 1954 Milwaukee had its report ldquoNew building in the core of anurban target [ought to] be prohibited except when it replaces existingstructures This is intended to halt the pouring of greater target valuesinto areas which are already richly rewarding as targetsrdquo Spreadingindustry wasnrsquot all that the report advocated The new region wouldneed new school districts novel tax structures and alternative typesof local governments Zoning would force dispersal from the centerinstitute bands of open space and deliver industrial plants to hinter-lands deliberately bypassed by major radial or circumferential roads inorder to avoid creating secondary concentrations ldquoThere is little doubtrdquothe reportrsquos author reckoned ldquothat some of [these] measures wouldhave to be fought through the Supreme Court before they were acceptedby allrdquo32 Pressed by national codes taxes defense spending andimprecations by the president on down local and federal authoritiescompeted to outdo the other in the rush away from the targeted center

America was not alone in declaring war on the urban center Canadain the midst of a major effort to plan urban growth in 1956 also begandefensive dispersal The Ofce of the Civil Defence Coordinator in col-laboration with the Defence Research Board and McGill Universityprepared a Guide to Urban Dispersal ldquoDispersal is the characteristicof present day urban growthrdquo the authors asserted Satellite towns andvillages made urban regions the right scale on which to re-think pat-terns of communication government and demography ldquoDefence iscritical In modern warfare the initial blow is struck at the civilian pop-ulation to destroy at a stroke the ability to resist The greatest vulnera-bility lies in urban concentrationmdashthe greatest security would beachieved by urban dispersalrdquo That dispersal would follow a survey ofa ring located an H-bomb radius away from the regional center That is

24 Grey Room 04

where the Guide came in Based in part on a real area and in part ongeneric characteristics the book was a how-to manual for planning thescattering of the urban into the regional Slope of the land location ofwater avenues of communication and transport needs all had to bereckoned The Guide instructed local leaders and planners how to dia-gram all this for their future Satellite towns would perch outside thering of safetymdashtowns that under no circumstances ought to attractmore than forty thousand inhabitants Ultimately government-pro-pelled ldquourban regionsrdquo would replace the ldquoamorphous formrdquo of currentmetropolitan development alleviating social and economic problemswhile securing spatial defense against thermonuclear attack33 City bycity country by country the bomb helped drive dispersion Indeedcoming full circle the Germans already all too familiar with aerialbombardment began preparing for a rain of hydrogen bombsHannover Bremen and Duumlsseldorf issued the rst three analyses andothers would follow Their comprehensive treatments covered the sta-tus of police re hospital postal service and road service followinga nuclear attack34

Preparation for atomic war was certainly on President Dwight DEisenhowerrsquos mind as he strove to resuscitate the long-debated federalhighway system Franklin D Roosevelt had pushed the idea in the1930s not least for its promise of providing jobs Reports rolled in TheBureau of Public Roads undertook one in 1938 and the chairman ofthat organization presided over another called Interregional Highwaysdated 1943 Other reports and standards marched on through the warwith some actually leading to road buildingmdashin 1947 crews began cut-ting the rst miles of interstate highways Still by the time Eisenhowercame into office in January 1953 there were but six thousand or somiles of road improvements actually on the ground (at a cost of nearly$1 billion)

Eisenhower liked highways He had struggled across the country ina motorized convoy back in 1919 an unpleasant sixty-two days of slip-ping on ice sticking in mud breaking into wooden bridges and freez-ing under snow The contrast with Germany was stark As SupremeCommander General Eisenhower had been astonished by the auto-bahns taking particular note of the advantages that road system affordedas he had to move masses of men and mateacuteriel across the conqueredReich ldquoGermany made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons acrossthe landrdquo On July 12 1954 Vice President Richard Nixon facing theconference of state governors at Lake George New York read fromEisenhowerrsquos prepared speech and the message was clear The obso-lete network had to go its antiquated byways were clogging the roadsand courts while leaving a death toll on the citizenry comparable to

Galison | War against the Center 25

Industrial dispersal 1956 Solidcircles show cities where dispersalplans were approved by late 1955dotted circles indicate communi-ties where plans were under prepa-ration Source Theodore K PasmaldquoIndustrial Dispersal 1956rdquo Indus-trial Development The NationalMagazine of Area Analysis andBusiness Site Selection (January-February 1956)

ldquoa bloody warrdquo But Eisenhowerrsquos final jab at the current system wasstark holding up for public contemplation its ldquoappalling inadequaciesto meet the demands of catastrophe or defense should an atomic warcomerdquo35 Radial roads would afford clear routes for city evacuationCircumferential roads Project East River had recommended back in1952 should be encouraged wherever possible to drain industry andpopulation from the dense city centers36 In fact highway designersconsulted with federal civil defense agencies and military plannersaimed for interstate highways that would bypass urban areas to avoidldquoroute[s] that had suffered a direct A-bomb hitrdquo37 It took two years ofpolitical wrangling and it goes without saying that economic housingand non-nuclear forces for the interstate were surely among its powerfulmotors By the end of 1956 the Interstate and Defense Highway Systemhad fundingmdashsome $25 billion of federal support38

3 Distributed KnowledgeBy 1960 the Air Force began dreaming worse nightmares than nuke-ladenbombers bullying their way past ghter defense Atomic strikes againstthe continental United States could be launched with missiles forwhich range of ight was no longer an issue The RAND Corporationmade its mark with contracts to think about this thermonuclear threatfrom the new think tank issued shelves of studies including thefamous (and famously parodied) volume by Herman Kahn On Thermo-nuclear War Just as Kahn stepped into the limelight the much lesswell known Paul Baran an electrical engineer coming from HughesAircraft Companyrsquos systems group joined RAND His job was todevelop a scheme that would ensure the survival of the US telecom-munications infrastructure through a Russian rst strikemdasha vital linknot only for domestic communication but also for command and con-trol His response in a series of papers launched in 1960 was a plan toremove completely critical nodes from the telephone system Like thethree highways many wanted from each dispersed defense plantBaranrsquos vision aimed for safety in redundantly connected spatially dis-tributed mini-centers

Here is how Baran put it in one of his rst papers

The cloud-of-doom attitude that nuclear war spells the end of theearth is slowly lifting from the minds of the many Better quanti-tative estimates of post-attack destruction together with a lessemotional discussion of the alternatives may mark the end of theldquowhat the hellmdashwhatrsquos the userdquo era A new view emerges the pos-sibility of a war exists but there is much that can be done to min-imize the consequences

26 Grey Room 04

De nition of redundancy Paul Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunications I Introductionto Distributed CommunicationsNetworkrdquo RAND Corporationmemorandum RM-3420-PRAugust 1964

Survivable atomic warmdashthe goal of the fteen-year struggle since theSurvey crew picked through the still radioactive rubble at HiroshimaBaran again

If war does not mean the end of the earth in a black and whitemanner then it follows that we should do those things that makethe shade of gray as light as possible to plan now to minimizepotential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permitthe survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstructthe economy swiftly39

That reconstruction demanded the elimination of the hierarchical center alternately referred to over these rst decades of the cold war asthe linchpin the bottleneck and the node

The problem as Baran formulated it did involve new equipment tolabel digitally each packet of information with a ldquotordquo and ldquofromrdquo andthen to route these fragments over diverse paths toward their eventualreassembly on arrival But before anything could be built moved dig-itized or reinforced the conceptual problem required attention Thatreconceptualization now took as it had not before a mathematicalform If nodes were replaced with redundant links how could heexploit the information-theoretic approach of Claude Shannon to countthe surviving paths between points in the array

Here is how Baran reasoned

Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network whichwill allow several hundred major communications stations to talkwith one another after an enemy attack As a criterion of surviv-ability we elect to use the percentage of stations both survivingthe physical attack and remaining in electrical connection withthe largest single group of surviving stations This criterion ischosen as a conservative measure of the ability of the survivingstations to operate together as a coherent entity after the attack40

With the result that a redundancy of at least R = 3would ensure a likely survival rate of nearly 75 percentBaran could now sketch the distributed system thatwould vouchsafe communication after nuclear war

Worst obviously was the centralized node that rep-resented the single critical target This was the situationwith concentrated steel electricity or oil plants it wasthe structure of the hubbed railway system It was inshort the bombing plannerrsquos dream and the bombingvictimrsquos nightmare Decentralized nodes that main-tained a local hierarchical structure were clearly better

Galison | War against the Center 27

a complete grid structure was best of all To a certain extent such gridsstood for the defensive ideal of dispersion more generally By increasingthe number of targets one decreased the likelihood of incapacitationHalting abortive and awkward though it was Baranrsquos scheme (alongwith a similar one developed in England) slowly wended its way throughdifferent incarnations in the ARPANET and Milnet But the elusivegoal all through these decades of distributed communication was a dis-tributed grid or mesh a thrust in the rst instance aimed at removingthe critical node Though in the garb of nuclear survivability the gridmay not appear as the redemptive Internet of our dreams that tech-nology grew directly out of fifteen years of longing for a world stillstanding after thermonuclear war41

4 We Are Become TargetsDuring the years of World War II American and British planners andanalysts learned to see through a bombsight Not in a single glimpsebut in the routine killings and losses that accompanied ever more fre-quently repeated raids Twenty-four hours a day day after day monthafter month year after year the planners and analysts studied andrestudied the interdependencies of the German economy circled tar-gets blasted factories leveled cities analyzed the damage and struckagain Chemicals nitric acid methanol Basic materials rubber steeloil aviation gas Transport systems electrical generators And popula-tion centers area bombing by the combined American and Britishforces killed some 600000 Germans In a war that the Nazis renderedever more vicious even as their defeat seemed inevitable the Americansrsquoearly dreams of precision bombing went by the way Two hundredplanes over Schweinfurt then four hundred but also Hamburg LuumlbeckMuumlnster Berlin Dresden Regensburg year after year Measuring bombloads accuracies reconstruction time 35 ton of bombs per acre toinduce damage of 8 percent delay time for reconstruction two and a

28 Grey Room 04

half months A calculus of fractions probabilities delaysBy the warrsquos end a new category of analyst had come into existence

more often than not social scientists and industrialists but also human-ists diplomats mathematicians and natural scientists Piecing togetherfragments of intelligence examining reconnaissance photographs theypainted an elaborate portrait of a wartime foe By warrsquos end the Surveyanalysts had come to see German and Japanese cities through what onemight call a ldquodestructive functionalismrdquo dependencies leading back-ward they kept hoping to the ever-elusive linchpin that when pulledwould topple the structure Schweinfurt was supposed to be one suchpoint with its all-important bearing factories And after Schweinfurtthere were other ldquobottlenecksrdquo to be targeted other cities other plantsother transshipment points

Perhaps before Hiroshima the bombsight eye had already begun toreect back I donrsquot know But in the atomic rubble as the analysts inter-viewed hundreds of blast survivors and canvassed the broken struc-tures as they methodically noted which kinds of concrete walls stillstood at various radii of destruction they began quite explicitly to seethemselves to see America through the bombardierrsquos eye They beganto wonder what an American city would look like after the bomb hadfallen Returning to the United States and publishing their StrategicBombing Survey things began to look different They began to see them-selves their towns and factories on the crosshairs of radial targetingmaps Far from a technological determinism the all-too material tech-nologies and concepts of self were fully imbricated

One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics launched when NorbertWiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedbackmachine that could be mimicked electronically from there it was a shortstep to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way Then humanphysiology began to appear as a cybernetic system then the humanmind then life then even the world system as a whole42 Somewherein the midst of total war a technocratic vision of a technical EnemyOther rose to become a vision of ourselves It was but a heartbeat beforecybernetics saturated the writings of Gregory Bateson and MargaretMead not to speak of philosophers planners and architects

But the consequence was this Three years before the Russians hadthe bomb in fact before on just about anyonersquos account the cold warhad begun American analysts were already advocating a massive dis-persion of factories and populations against atomic aerial attack

As the cold war arms race accelerated the search for ldquodefense in spacerdquogrew more desperate jet bombers atomic bombs hydrogen bombsintercontinental ballistic missiles With each step more frantic urgingto spread the cities into their ldquomarketing areasrdquo Highway systems

Galison | War against the Center 29

Centralized decentralized and distributed networksSource Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

To realize these goals Albert Speerrsquos assistant Karl-Otto Saur createda vast ldquoghter staffrdquo from which one member was dispatched perma-nently to every airframe factory in the Reich even as the fighter staffpartitioned the factories into hundreds of sites many of which stood inforest clearings8 Acknowledging the success of the dispersal programthe Strategic Bombing Survey allowed that Nazi airframe productionactually increased during 1944 They concluded that Germany lostcontrol of the air not by a lack of planes but by the shortage of well-trained pilots and aviation fuel

But the operations analysts selecting targets were not just after par-ticular pieces of munitions factories their goal was to precipitate a col-lapse of the German economy as a whole To that end they directed aseries of studies designed to locate just those plants where destructionwould cause shortages to ripple through the entire system Operationsfollowed Henry ldquoHaprdquo Arnold for example tempted Harry Hopkinswith the notion that blasting the German ball bearing industry ldquowouldprobably wreck all German industryrdquo9

At the top of the Alliesrsquo bombing priority list stood ball bearingswithout which they reckoned German machinery would quite literallygrind to a halt As the authors of the Strategic Bombing Survey put it

On the afternoon of the 17th of August 1943 some 200 FlyingFortresses flying from their bases in England deep into Bavariaand unescorted after reaching the German border struck the rstgreat blow aimed at the complete destruction of an entire andessential segment of the German war economy10

Some 52 percent of German bearing production lay in an enormousfactory complex at Schweinfurt US Army Air Force planes hit the

10 Grey Room 04

city with some four hundred tons of bombs while the Germans struckdown thirty-six of the attackers The raids continued with some eleventhousand tons of bombs dropped the most destructive of which tookplace on 14 October 1943 Again over two hundred planes descendedon the plant letting loose 450 tons of high explosives and incendiariesdestroying 10 percent of the machinery 20 percent of the stock and350000 square feet of plant German antindashaircraft batteries and ghtersshot down an even greater number of planes than on the earlier bigraid killing some six hundred airmen As a direct result of that attackSpeer near panic put his closest associate Philip Kessler in charge ofprotecting and dispersing the bearing industry By August 1944 whenthe Allies ew an eight-hundred-plane raid against Schweinfurt half thefactory was elsewhere11 Having faced this barrage the Germans braggedat warrsquos end ldquoEs ist kein Geraet zurueck geblieben weil Waelzlagerfehltenrdquo (No equipment was left behind because bearings were lacking)American analysts ought to take the lesson to heart the authors of theStrategic Bombing Survey insisted ldquoeven in the case of a very concen-trated industry very heavy and continuous attack must be made sinceotherwise the enemy if he can survive the initial shock will be able totake successful countermeasuresrdquo12

These target categories airframes and bearings were supposed tohave choked the German war-making capacity Both after a frantic dis-persal lost the vulnerability that the Americans expected Consequentlystarting in spring 1944 Allied strategy broadened in large measurebecause by then they had air superiority over the entirety of GermanyPlanners began to plot two new ldquobottlenecksrdquo to squeeze shut First theoperations analysts began directing airplanes against the synthetic oilindustrymdashthat is oil produced with the massive coal deposits of the

Ruhr They hit the steel industry hard anddrove massive missions against chemicalplants By doing so they aimed simultane-ously to damage the German home economyand to cripple rolling armor at the front

While reporting successful ldquobottleneckrdquoattacks such as the campaign against oil thereport itself was in essence doing its ownreconstruction of the German economymdashand its authors did not hesitate to point outwhere the original planners had failed tofind a vulnerable point For example theylamented that the combined Allied air forceslet loose only 05 percent of their bomb loadon the electrical industry even though the

Galison | War against the Center 11

Opposite Bombs dropped on German bearing targetsSource USSBS

Left German crude steel production Source USSBS

Germans themselves (as Speer later asserted) were terried of an engulf-ing Allied drive against German generating stations Power plants wereconcentrated in a limited number of locations generators could notstockpile their electrical product and the Germans had a terrible timerepairing damaged power stations Perusing captured documents theStrategic Bombing Survey authors reported

The secret minutes of the central planning committee studyingthe power shortage make this weakness clear The difculties ofadding capacity the limitations of the so-called grid system therelationship of curtailment and shortage of electric energy to pro-duction losses in industry and their fears that their extreme vul-nerability would be discovered are all paraded openly in theseminutes made by the Germans in the midst of the war13

Hitting forty-ve plants would have been dangerous for Germany as awholemdasha result they justified by testimony from Speer himself Andthese plants unlike much else could not be dispersed Similarly ldquoamajor opportunity in the Allied air offensive against oil was unexploitedrdquoin that the production of ethyl uid was crucial for aviation fuel andethyl uid required tertraethyl lead There were only two tetraethyl leadplants in Germany These the report insisted should have been hit14

Or again ldquoconcentration on the few synthetic rubber plants as a primarybombing target early in the war would have proven protablerdquo15

Again and again the bomb analysts repeated their message Aerialwarfare worked when it hit concentrated centralized production stand-ing at a functional node upstream of many other industries Bombingfailed when the Germans effectively dispersed their factories Separa-tion in space worked exceedingly well in other sectors Beginning in1934 the Nazis had already scattered their explosive and propellantplants but only in 1944 had they launched (rather unsuccessful)attempts to decentralize plants producing nitrogen (needed for gun-powder) and methanol (crucial for high explosives)16 Similarly Speerand his most valued lieutenant Edmund Geilenberg scrambled des-perately in the nal months of the war to disperse J-2 jet fuel for theirlast-ditch attempt to stem air losses with their new wonder weaponthe jet ghter

2 The Bombsight MirrorWhile they were assessing the air war against Nazi Germany theStrategic Bombing Survey analysts had under way a massive inquiryinto the assault on Japan Without reviewing the bulk of their study ofconventional bombing I want to turn to the report they led on the atomicattacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki That text chronicles the horrific

12 Grey Room 04

effects of the blast separately and methodically outlining its effect onbuildings and bodies by pressure heat and radiation Taking the testi-mony of hundreds of survivors the analysts asked about morale inquiredabout feelings of rebellion toward the government about attitudestoward the United States The bomb surveyors even if briey exploredthe effect of the nuclear devastation on internal high-level Japanesedeliberations about the future of the war

Suddenly in the concluding section of the report the authors took adifferent tack and the tone changed Gone was the absolute distancethe surveyors had managed to maintain toward industrial targets citiesand military objectives All at once the weapons dropped on an enemyjust months before began to appear in an inverted vision in which thosesame weapons appeared turned against the United States

The Surveyrsquos investigators as they proceeded about their studyfound an insistent question framing itself in their minds ldquoWhat ifthe target for the bomb had been an American cityrdquo True the pri-mary mission of the Survey was to ascertain the facts just sum-marized But conclusions as to the meaning of those facts forcitizens of the United States forced themselves almost inescapablyon the men who examined thoughtfully the remains of Hiroshimaand Nagasaki17

Sifting the rubble interviewing the wounded survivors the BombingSurvey investigators began to see similarities between Japanese build-ings and American ones between surviving structures at Hiroshimaand possible shelters in the United States They made it clear in printthat they thought the two nuclear-devastated sites were the best argu-ment against war itself but they also began to speculate on howAmericans might survive the kinds of attacks they themselves had justvisited on the Japanese

The fate of industries in both cities again illustrates the value ofdecentralization All major factories in Hiroshima were on theperiphery of the citymdashand escaped serious damage at Nagasakiplants and dockyards at the southern end of the city were merelyintact but those in the valley where the bomb exploded wereseriously damaged18

Medical facilities typically located in the central parts of the cities lay in smoldering ruins So it had been in Hamburg where survivors of theraids had lain in shock without assistance in their hours of greatest need

Looking at Hiroshima Nagasaki and Hamburg Survey personnelbegan to see their own large cities Already in 1946 they pressed for adramatic shift in the way those cities were conceived

Galison | War against the Center 13

The similar peril of American cities and the extent to which wisezoning has diminished it differ from city to city Though a reshap-ing and partial dispersal of the national centers of activity aredrastic and difcult measures they represent a social and mili-tary ideal toward which very practical steps can be taken once thepolicy has been laid down19

Efforts toward decentralization remained desultory during 1947But already Congress had ordered the National Security ResourcesBoard to begin exploring industrial relocation Abruptly in the sum-mer of 1949 the laissez-faire mood ended For it was in August that theRussians detonated their rst atomic bomb named by the West Joe 1Despite nearly four years of warning that the Russians would probablyhave nuclear weapons within five years of the Trinity test Americanpolicy experts politicians military officers and atomic scientistsreacted with an alarm bordering on panic Called to offer a response tothe Russian bomb in October 1949 the General Advisory Committee(GAC) under J Robert Oppenheimer convened only to harden theirresistance to further escalation of the arms race In a surprising andunanimous vote the GAC recommended against building the hydrogenbomb on moral grounds A weapon of genocide they asserted an ldquoevilunder lightrdquo It was that anti-H-bomb decision soon ratied by the AtomicEnergy Commissioners that sent a ssure straight down the center of acommunity of scientists grown close-knit during the war

The GACrsquos H-bomb report catalyzed a swift hard struggle betweenopponents and proponents of this new category of weapon Lobbyingbegan in secretmdashand then burst into the public arena after a congressionalleak Editorials in newspapers magazines and television erupted onboth sides with debate continuing all the way up to President Harry S Trumanrsquos decision in January 1950 The country would in fact buildthe hydrogen bomb In June 1950 the Korean War beganmdashmobilizationindustrial and military heightened as never before and the govern-ment inaugurated a still-continuing national commitment to a hugemilitary establishment

It was in this context that in August 1951 the president announceda national policy for industrial dispersion and the National SecurityResources Board quickly followed with a booklet entitled Is Your Planta Target that proclaimed ldquoThe risk of an all-out atomic attack on theUnited States grows greater each day since we are no longer the solepossessor of the secret of the atomic bomb This means that no indus-trial area in the Nation can be considered safe from attackrdquo20 To guar-antee survival the National Security Resources Board insisted wouldrequire that productive capacity be protected ldquoThe dispersion (or

14 Grey Room 04

Site selection for securitySource Industrial DispersionNational Security ResourcesBoard Is Your Plant a Target(Washington DC US Govern-ment Printing Of ce 1951)

deployment in space) of new plant development for war-supportingindustries can make American production less vulnerable to attackrdquoSpace could protect men at the battleeld the authors continued andspace by multiplying targets would diminish ldquothe vulnerability of anyone concentrationrdquo

Behind this national program lay four principles First the disper-sion would be of new industries rather than old second ldquono region ofthe country is to be built up at the expense of anotherrdquo third the dis-persion would take place within so-called ldquomarketing areasrdquo and fourthstate and local governments with private industry would initiate thechange and the federal government would encourage and providetechnical guidance

To tempt industrialists the Feds advertised additional benets thatwould accrue to those industries that dispersed better working andliving conditions for workers greater production by avoiding urbancongestion a healthier more stable economy Adding further quitematerial sweeteners to the mix the federal government promised toallocate ldquocerticates of necessityrdquo critical materials emergency loansand defense contracts to those industries that escaped the connes ofurban concentration Reading the booklet the industrialist and thecivic leader could begin asking themselves these questions

The handy cow pasture on the edge of town may look like a goodsite but does it measure up to the all-important security stan-dards Is it strategically located in relation to labor supply fueltransportation and other requirements for efcient and econom-

Galison | War against the Center 15

ical production Is the site properly located in relation to futurehomes shops schools and other community developments Hasfull consideration been given to efcient wartime productionand long-term benets to industry and community When youhave answered these questions you are on the way to developinga sound industrial dispersion program21

Industrialists swarmed toward Washington to assess the new plansGathered under the auspices of the Executive Ofce of the President

the National Security Resources Board assembled the key players on 7September 1951 in the Executive Ofce Building in Washington DC

Jack Small chairman of the Munitions Board told the assembledthat he was more scared now than when he came down to Washingtonsome nine months earlier

In the intervening time that God has given us we have madeprogress in the production of weapons getting new weaponsmade and creating a force strength but we are not yet ready andwe are in really desperate danger in the event that our enemyattacks For Godrsquos sake donrsquot get the idea that this thing isover or that the danger has nished or that these fanatic enemiesof ours have changed their plans or objectives one iota Theyhave not We will have achieved by next year a posture ofmore strength but still it will not be enough strength to pre-vent aggression

The ldquoall-outrdquo could come at any moment Small insisted to the indus-trialists and it could come by intention or by accident There was onlyone hope ldquoSpace is the one thing that really worksrdquo22

Soon however the discussion turned away from plutonium andtoward prots How queried the representatives from Alabama andLouisiana might this dispersion bring industry to their areas and awayfrom the Northeast which already had such access to the federal silverspoon Industrialists wondered aloud how much federal force-feedingthere would be and the ofcials reassured them that they intended inno way to damage business interests lower productivity or threaten a lossof labor supply This was to be dispersion within a marketing areamdashnot wholesale relocation to distant states

Small and his colleagues in dispersion left the audience withsomewhat vague injunctions But the national policy did vastly moreit aimed to make citizens of every community into target analysts oftheir own region As the Bureau of Commerce patiently explainedldquomaterials and methods for identifying the potential target areas aredescribed on the following pagesrdquo23 Those ldquopotential target areasrdquo

16 Grey Room 04

were the cities and towns of the United States Here is how the Commerce Department directed every community

but especially the top 168 metropolitan areas to proceed First checkthe list of industrial classifications and identify all those plantsemploying more than one hundred workers per peak shift These ranfrom industrial inorganic chemicals coke and byproducts to steelmills engines aircraft scientific instruments photographic equip-ment and ordnance Then identify those locations on a map (naturallynot disclosing the precise role of any single plant to unwanted eyes)Combine this information with outlines of heavily populated sectionsfollowing the information of the Census Bureau Lay out two largemaps (one inch equals one mile) showing political subdivisions arterialhighways railroads ports and harbors alongside industrial areas Nextdraw a series of four-inch (four-mile) circles on transparent overlaysmdashthese correspond to the area destroyed by an atomic bomb

Now you are ready to identify your regionrsquos target zones ldquothose areasthat contain sufcient concentrations of industry or population so asto constitute attractive atom-bomb targetsrdquo24 Just ldquoattractive atom-bombtargetsrdquo not sites ldquolikely to be targeted by the Russiansrdquomdashthe reifiedshorthand compresses all those years of wartime and then postwar tar-geting Your goal in what follows is to use these circles to form a targetout of the city as a whole by transecting the four-mile-diameter circlesonce they are judiciously located In particular the full target will contain both valuable defense-related industries (employing 16000workers in toto) or a residential population of 200000 people

Here is the schematic procedureThis region outlined by the dark line encloses the ldquohighly indus-

trialized sectionrdquo as defined by the National Industrial DispersionProgram Next each community is to plot the census tracts on the sec-ond set of working maps At the center of each tract goes a dot and thepopulation Again you overlay a four-mile transparent circle movingit until it circles a population of 200000 When you connect the centersof these 200000-person circles you have formed a ldquodensely populatedsectionrdquo Next join the two maps in such a way as to form a combinedarea embracing the high density of regions of both industry and popu-lation This joint region the Commerce Department declared wouldbe known as a potential A-bomb target zone From that zone measureten inches (ten miles) out to form the dispersal limit line There is yourgoal Locate all future critical industry and its associated populationspast the line of safety taking care not to create inadvertently a secondarypotential A-bomb target zone

These maps were not designed just to scare they would form witha factory proposal an application for a ldquocerticate of necessityrdquo (granting

Galison | War against the Center 17

18 Grey Room 04

Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo

Boundary of highly industrial ized section

Census-tract population centers with population gures

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of highly industrialized section

Galison | War against the Center 19

Top row left to right Self-targeting step I Take the listof government designated defense-related industries and plot theirlocation and employment This isthe rst task towards the construc-tion of areas known as the highlyindustrialized sections Source USDepartment of Commerce Indus-trial Dispersion Guidebook forCommunities Domestic CommerceSeries no 31 (Washington DCUS Government Printing Of ce1952)

Self-targeting step II To completethe construction of the perimeterof the highly industrialized sectionsdraw circles of four-mile radiusconnect centers of circles contain-ing more than 16000 workersSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step III Label populations from census tractsSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Bottom row left to right Self-targeting step IV To completethe construction of the denselypopulated sections draw circles offour-mile radius and connect thecenters of circles with more than200000 inhabitants SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Self-targeting step V Now super-impose the highly industrializedarea on the densely populatedarea Taken together they form the potential A-bomb Target zoneSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step VI Drawingthe potential A-bomb target zoneon a regional map planners shouldnow construct a safety margin often miles from the outside of theendangered area All new industrialplants should be dispersed out-side this ten-mile radius SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Census-tract population centers with population gures

accelerated tax amortization) facilitating the approval of defense loansand securing defense contracts

Bombing the Axis economy and dispersing the American one werereflections of one another When Charles E Wilson director of theOffice of Defense Mobilization came before the National SecurityResources Board of the Presidentrsquos Executive Office he needed anexpert on how to disperse industry To the captains of industry assem-bled for a 1951 hearing Wilson sought to justify his strictures aboutsplitting plants by ten or twenty miles ldquoMr Gorrie brought me a realexpert on that I call him a real expert because he was one of the menwho had done bombing in the industrial arena of Germany and cer-tainly he convinced me that 10 or 20 miles provides reasonable safetyrdquo25

Bombers braced for bombsIn 1952 Project East River (Associated Universities contracted to the

federal government) reported on how Washington could drive indus-try outside the expanding urban areas ldquoleapfroggingrdquo away from urbancores One role was to create ldquopublic understandingrdquo of the need forldquosatellite townrdquo planning and its defense use More materially theEast River gang reported the federal government should provide aidto assist in the construction of urban arteries to the satellite towns pro-vide rent subsidies to small businesses send appropriations to matchmetropolitan planning units offer tax assistance for new constructionin outlying areas demand dispersal to qualify for federal defenseinsurance and promote federal loans and grants for the constructionof outlying schools streets water and sewers The government shouldsubsidize ring roads around citiesmdashlike Route 128 around Bostonmdashand strive to locate defense industry on it Above all the fast-increas-ing population ofce building and industry heading into cities had tobe reversed Throughout constant vigilance against the re-creation ofnew centers26

Eponymously the report took as its ldquoarea studyrdquo the imagined caseof a Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapon detonated several thousand feetabove a 260-acre rectangle in Manhattan adjacent to the East RiverWith detailed information about the age structure and flammabilityof individual buildingsmdashand recent census datamdashthis not-so-typicalpiece of America could then be tracked as it shattered and burnedunder the assault of nuclear attack How many of the 35000 peopleresiding between 59th and 72nd Streets (between 3rd Avenue and theriver) would become casualties if a weapon were to be exploded at 2 AM How many minutesrsquo warning would they have to take shelterHow much radiation would they receive Would a firestorm eruptBased principally on the results of the US Strategic Bombing Surveyon Hiroshima and Nagasaki this report was in a sense a dully terrifying

20 Grey Room 04

answer to the question the Bombing Survey had posed seven years earlier What would the bombs that were let loose over Hiroshima havelooked like were they to have been dropped back home27

Under the guidance of these various boards and the lucrative drawof taxes loans and contracts one by one key industrial and civic leaderslearned to see themselves through the reflection of a bombsight Oneby one they began plotting their own dispersion In September 1955for example the Chemical and Engineering News reported on atomicvulnerability in the chemical process industry Nuclear weapons jetairplanes and the concept of total war combined wrote Neil P HurleySJ to blur the distinction between military force and industrial poten-tial The role of an industrymdashits functional interdependence on otherindustriesmdashxed the likelihood of its plants becoming targets Chemical-process industries were vulnerable on two fronts geographic concen-tration and functional criticality The conclusion was as inevitable asit was fearsome ldquoThree well-directed H-bombs on these key targetareas would have serious consequences for the industrial chemicalproducing complexrdquo28 Two-thirds of workers making industrial chem-icals lived in ten states

American chemical dispersion in 1955 was directly and explicitlylinked to German chemical dispersion in 1945 Over and over againHurley cited the Strategic Bombing Survey ldquoIt is worth noting thatantifriction bearings represented an Achilles heel in the German econ-omy in World War II The Strategic Bombing Survey indicated a paral-ysis of German industry following Allied air force bombings ofSchweinfurt where more than 50 of German antifriction bearingswere producedrdquo Four H-bombs for example could wipe out half the UScapacity to produce instruments and related products ldquoUnfortunatelythe US has many Schweinfurts In the Great Lakes region are to befound 47 of the nonelectrical machinery productionrdquo A saturationattack on that regionmdashand saturation would not take many bombsmdashwould Hurley noted destroy a vast array of industries including thatof chemicals29

Throughout the 1950s the Strategic Bombing Survey remained cen-tral to thinking about nuclear warfare and the dispersion of industryHurley for example in constructing his report on American chemicalpriorities reproduced the Surveyrsquos list of the ten most vital chemicalsfor the German war effort from nitrogen methanol and calcium car-bide down to caustic soda chlorine and sodium carbonate He reca-pitulated the Surveyrsquos conclusions about the shortages of nitric acid onthe manufacture of explosives the reduction of methanol that cut intothe making of high explosives and the Germansrsquo vain last-ditch effortsto create underground factories In this new narrative Americans

Galison | War against the Center 21

played the role previously performed by Germans Russians took overthe bombing role from the Allies Those who had used their knowledgeof American industry had planned the strategic bombing of the Axisnow they became the potential bombing victims readying plans to disperse Here is Hurley

To avoid a repetition in this country of the unfortunate experi-ences of the Germans during World War II necessary moves mustbe made before any outbreak of hostilities The Germans enjoyedthe luxury of learning from their mistakes It is highly doubtfulwhether in the atomic age any nation will have the same oppor-tunitymdashone mistake may well be the last30

Dispersal could aid in reconstruction and also preventionmdasha strongernation ldquoprotected in spacerdquo (as the phrase went) would deter any attacker

Admiral Ben Moreell retired from the Navy and in the mid-1950schairman of Jones amp Laughlin Steel Corporation had just presented tothe secretary of commerce the manifesto of the purposes of the Ironand Steel Advisory Council The council had urged a mobilization planfor steel in light of the threat presented by high-speed jet airplaneslong-range missiles and nuclear weapons that ldquoour prospectiveenemyrdquo might at any time hurl without warning Big steel needed acomplete control center one linked by telegraph and radio to the steel-making plants Admiral Moreell and his fellow advisers emphasizedthe proximate danger of Russians with H-bombs and in fact asMoreell noted they had one just a few days after his committee laid itsreport at Commerce Worriedly the admiral allowed that 75 percent ofAmerican steelmaking capacity could be destroyed by a mere tenhydrogen bombs The councilrsquos recommendation disperse 25 percentof the capacity in such a way that the resulting plants would be splitup into numerous single-function plants providing each plant with atleast three alternative modes for transporting its products It was timeMoreell intoned to take similar measures in a host of other industriesincluding rubber copper glass aluminum textiles automobiles andelectrical products Prepare for real costs for steel alone the disper-sion bill would run to some $10 billion

Moreell ldquoPerhaps I have overemphasized the hazard under whichwe now live I do not believe so The facts which are coming out withrespect to the tactics and policies of the Communist enemy in Chinaand Korea added to what we already know about them justify the con-clusion that we are facing a ruthless adversary who will permit nohumane consideration to inuence his decisions who will strike with-out prior warning and whose ambition is to rule the worldrdquo31

Dispersion might help the admiral concluded Like so much of this lit-

22 Grey Room 04

Opposite top Where the steelindustry is concentrated Source Admiral Ben MoreellldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do toUS Industriesrdquo US News andWorld Report 7 May 1954

Opposite bottom Destroyingsteel Source Moreell ldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do to USIndustriesrdquo

erature issues of protability and patriotism stood side by side and heconcluded under the ag gesturing to the Founding Father ldquoIn timeof peace prepare for warrdquo

Preparations advanced In 1956 Industrial Development a nationalmagazine dedicated to ldquoarea analysis and business site selectionrdquoreported that the Ofce of Area Development had reviewed and approvedsome fty-eight of the self-prepared urban area surveys Money talkedBy mid-June 1955 projects valued at $30 billion had qualied for taxabatements under the program

Take Milwaukee In December 1953 the cityrsquos mayor Frank Zeidlertraveled to the White House where the president addressed some twohundred large-city mayors in stark terms ldquoFor the rst time in historycities have become principal targets for an enemy seeking to conquerour nation The city has moved from a position of support in the rear Ithas moved out into the front linerdquo Immediately Zeidler arrangedto meet with the Wisconsin governor and the mayors of RacineMadison and Green Joining the chorus of civil defense authorities themayors agreed that in the short term they would need plans for rapidevacuation in the event of a nuclear attack at the same time theyneeded to begin longer-term planning for the dispersal of the city By

Galison | War against the Center 23

May 1954 Milwaukee had its report ldquoNew building in the core of anurban target [ought to] be prohibited except when it replaces existingstructures This is intended to halt the pouring of greater target valuesinto areas which are already richly rewarding as targetsrdquo Spreadingindustry wasnrsquot all that the report advocated The new region wouldneed new school districts novel tax structures and alternative typesof local governments Zoning would force dispersal from the centerinstitute bands of open space and deliver industrial plants to hinter-lands deliberately bypassed by major radial or circumferential roads inorder to avoid creating secondary concentrations ldquoThere is little doubtrdquothe reportrsquos author reckoned ldquothat some of [these] measures wouldhave to be fought through the Supreme Court before they were acceptedby allrdquo32 Pressed by national codes taxes defense spending andimprecations by the president on down local and federal authoritiescompeted to outdo the other in the rush away from the targeted center

America was not alone in declaring war on the urban center Canadain the midst of a major effort to plan urban growth in 1956 also begandefensive dispersal The Ofce of the Civil Defence Coordinator in col-laboration with the Defence Research Board and McGill Universityprepared a Guide to Urban Dispersal ldquoDispersal is the characteristicof present day urban growthrdquo the authors asserted Satellite towns andvillages made urban regions the right scale on which to re-think pat-terns of communication government and demography ldquoDefence iscritical In modern warfare the initial blow is struck at the civilian pop-ulation to destroy at a stroke the ability to resist The greatest vulnera-bility lies in urban concentrationmdashthe greatest security would beachieved by urban dispersalrdquo That dispersal would follow a survey ofa ring located an H-bomb radius away from the regional center That is

24 Grey Room 04

where the Guide came in Based in part on a real area and in part ongeneric characteristics the book was a how-to manual for planning thescattering of the urban into the regional Slope of the land location ofwater avenues of communication and transport needs all had to bereckoned The Guide instructed local leaders and planners how to dia-gram all this for their future Satellite towns would perch outside thering of safetymdashtowns that under no circumstances ought to attractmore than forty thousand inhabitants Ultimately government-pro-pelled ldquourban regionsrdquo would replace the ldquoamorphous formrdquo of currentmetropolitan development alleviating social and economic problemswhile securing spatial defense against thermonuclear attack33 City bycity country by country the bomb helped drive dispersion Indeedcoming full circle the Germans already all too familiar with aerialbombardment began preparing for a rain of hydrogen bombsHannover Bremen and Duumlsseldorf issued the rst three analyses andothers would follow Their comprehensive treatments covered the sta-tus of police re hospital postal service and road service followinga nuclear attack34

Preparation for atomic war was certainly on President Dwight DEisenhowerrsquos mind as he strove to resuscitate the long-debated federalhighway system Franklin D Roosevelt had pushed the idea in the1930s not least for its promise of providing jobs Reports rolled in TheBureau of Public Roads undertook one in 1938 and the chairman ofthat organization presided over another called Interregional Highwaysdated 1943 Other reports and standards marched on through the warwith some actually leading to road buildingmdashin 1947 crews began cut-ting the rst miles of interstate highways Still by the time Eisenhowercame into office in January 1953 there were but six thousand or somiles of road improvements actually on the ground (at a cost of nearly$1 billion)

Eisenhower liked highways He had struggled across the country ina motorized convoy back in 1919 an unpleasant sixty-two days of slip-ping on ice sticking in mud breaking into wooden bridges and freez-ing under snow The contrast with Germany was stark As SupremeCommander General Eisenhower had been astonished by the auto-bahns taking particular note of the advantages that road system affordedas he had to move masses of men and mateacuteriel across the conqueredReich ldquoGermany made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons acrossthe landrdquo On July 12 1954 Vice President Richard Nixon facing theconference of state governors at Lake George New York read fromEisenhowerrsquos prepared speech and the message was clear The obso-lete network had to go its antiquated byways were clogging the roadsand courts while leaving a death toll on the citizenry comparable to

Galison | War against the Center 25

Industrial dispersal 1956 Solidcircles show cities where dispersalplans were approved by late 1955dotted circles indicate communi-ties where plans were under prepa-ration Source Theodore K PasmaldquoIndustrial Dispersal 1956rdquo Indus-trial Development The NationalMagazine of Area Analysis andBusiness Site Selection (January-February 1956)

ldquoa bloody warrdquo But Eisenhowerrsquos final jab at the current system wasstark holding up for public contemplation its ldquoappalling inadequaciesto meet the demands of catastrophe or defense should an atomic warcomerdquo35 Radial roads would afford clear routes for city evacuationCircumferential roads Project East River had recommended back in1952 should be encouraged wherever possible to drain industry andpopulation from the dense city centers36 In fact highway designersconsulted with federal civil defense agencies and military plannersaimed for interstate highways that would bypass urban areas to avoidldquoroute[s] that had suffered a direct A-bomb hitrdquo37 It took two years ofpolitical wrangling and it goes without saying that economic housingand non-nuclear forces for the interstate were surely among its powerfulmotors By the end of 1956 the Interstate and Defense Highway Systemhad fundingmdashsome $25 billion of federal support38

3 Distributed KnowledgeBy 1960 the Air Force began dreaming worse nightmares than nuke-ladenbombers bullying their way past ghter defense Atomic strikes againstthe continental United States could be launched with missiles forwhich range of ight was no longer an issue The RAND Corporationmade its mark with contracts to think about this thermonuclear threatfrom the new think tank issued shelves of studies including thefamous (and famously parodied) volume by Herman Kahn On Thermo-nuclear War Just as Kahn stepped into the limelight the much lesswell known Paul Baran an electrical engineer coming from HughesAircraft Companyrsquos systems group joined RAND His job was todevelop a scheme that would ensure the survival of the US telecom-munications infrastructure through a Russian rst strikemdasha vital linknot only for domestic communication but also for command and con-trol His response in a series of papers launched in 1960 was a plan toremove completely critical nodes from the telephone system Like thethree highways many wanted from each dispersed defense plantBaranrsquos vision aimed for safety in redundantly connected spatially dis-tributed mini-centers

Here is how Baran put it in one of his rst papers

The cloud-of-doom attitude that nuclear war spells the end of theearth is slowly lifting from the minds of the many Better quanti-tative estimates of post-attack destruction together with a lessemotional discussion of the alternatives may mark the end of theldquowhat the hellmdashwhatrsquos the userdquo era A new view emerges the pos-sibility of a war exists but there is much that can be done to min-imize the consequences

26 Grey Room 04

De nition of redundancy Paul Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunications I Introductionto Distributed CommunicationsNetworkrdquo RAND Corporationmemorandum RM-3420-PRAugust 1964

Survivable atomic warmdashthe goal of the fteen-year struggle since theSurvey crew picked through the still radioactive rubble at HiroshimaBaran again

If war does not mean the end of the earth in a black and whitemanner then it follows that we should do those things that makethe shade of gray as light as possible to plan now to minimizepotential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permitthe survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstructthe economy swiftly39

That reconstruction demanded the elimination of the hierarchical center alternately referred to over these rst decades of the cold war asthe linchpin the bottleneck and the node

The problem as Baran formulated it did involve new equipment tolabel digitally each packet of information with a ldquotordquo and ldquofromrdquo andthen to route these fragments over diverse paths toward their eventualreassembly on arrival But before anything could be built moved dig-itized or reinforced the conceptual problem required attention Thatreconceptualization now took as it had not before a mathematicalform If nodes were replaced with redundant links how could heexploit the information-theoretic approach of Claude Shannon to countthe surviving paths between points in the array

Here is how Baran reasoned

Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network whichwill allow several hundred major communications stations to talkwith one another after an enemy attack As a criterion of surviv-ability we elect to use the percentage of stations both survivingthe physical attack and remaining in electrical connection withthe largest single group of surviving stations This criterion ischosen as a conservative measure of the ability of the survivingstations to operate together as a coherent entity after the attack40

With the result that a redundancy of at least R = 3would ensure a likely survival rate of nearly 75 percentBaran could now sketch the distributed system thatwould vouchsafe communication after nuclear war

Worst obviously was the centralized node that rep-resented the single critical target This was the situationwith concentrated steel electricity or oil plants it wasthe structure of the hubbed railway system It was inshort the bombing plannerrsquos dream and the bombingvictimrsquos nightmare Decentralized nodes that main-tained a local hierarchical structure were clearly better

Galison | War against the Center 27

a complete grid structure was best of all To a certain extent such gridsstood for the defensive ideal of dispersion more generally By increasingthe number of targets one decreased the likelihood of incapacitationHalting abortive and awkward though it was Baranrsquos scheme (alongwith a similar one developed in England) slowly wended its way throughdifferent incarnations in the ARPANET and Milnet But the elusivegoal all through these decades of distributed communication was a dis-tributed grid or mesh a thrust in the rst instance aimed at removingthe critical node Though in the garb of nuclear survivability the gridmay not appear as the redemptive Internet of our dreams that tech-nology grew directly out of fifteen years of longing for a world stillstanding after thermonuclear war41

4 We Are Become TargetsDuring the years of World War II American and British planners andanalysts learned to see through a bombsight Not in a single glimpsebut in the routine killings and losses that accompanied ever more fre-quently repeated raids Twenty-four hours a day day after day monthafter month year after year the planners and analysts studied andrestudied the interdependencies of the German economy circled tar-gets blasted factories leveled cities analyzed the damage and struckagain Chemicals nitric acid methanol Basic materials rubber steeloil aviation gas Transport systems electrical generators And popula-tion centers area bombing by the combined American and Britishforces killed some 600000 Germans In a war that the Nazis renderedever more vicious even as their defeat seemed inevitable the Americansrsquoearly dreams of precision bombing went by the way Two hundredplanes over Schweinfurt then four hundred but also Hamburg LuumlbeckMuumlnster Berlin Dresden Regensburg year after year Measuring bombloads accuracies reconstruction time 35 ton of bombs per acre toinduce damage of 8 percent delay time for reconstruction two and a

28 Grey Room 04

half months A calculus of fractions probabilities delaysBy the warrsquos end a new category of analyst had come into existence

more often than not social scientists and industrialists but also human-ists diplomats mathematicians and natural scientists Piecing togetherfragments of intelligence examining reconnaissance photographs theypainted an elaborate portrait of a wartime foe By warrsquos end the Surveyanalysts had come to see German and Japanese cities through what onemight call a ldquodestructive functionalismrdquo dependencies leading back-ward they kept hoping to the ever-elusive linchpin that when pulledwould topple the structure Schweinfurt was supposed to be one suchpoint with its all-important bearing factories And after Schweinfurtthere were other ldquobottlenecksrdquo to be targeted other cities other plantsother transshipment points

Perhaps before Hiroshima the bombsight eye had already begun toreect back I donrsquot know But in the atomic rubble as the analysts inter-viewed hundreds of blast survivors and canvassed the broken struc-tures as they methodically noted which kinds of concrete walls stillstood at various radii of destruction they began quite explicitly to seethemselves to see America through the bombardierrsquos eye They beganto wonder what an American city would look like after the bomb hadfallen Returning to the United States and publishing their StrategicBombing Survey things began to look different They began to see them-selves their towns and factories on the crosshairs of radial targetingmaps Far from a technological determinism the all-too material tech-nologies and concepts of self were fully imbricated

One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics launched when NorbertWiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedbackmachine that could be mimicked electronically from there it was a shortstep to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way Then humanphysiology began to appear as a cybernetic system then the humanmind then life then even the world system as a whole42 Somewherein the midst of total war a technocratic vision of a technical EnemyOther rose to become a vision of ourselves It was but a heartbeat beforecybernetics saturated the writings of Gregory Bateson and MargaretMead not to speak of philosophers planners and architects

But the consequence was this Three years before the Russians hadthe bomb in fact before on just about anyonersquos account the cold warhad begun American analysts were already advocating a massive dis-persion of factories and populations against atomic aerial attack

As the cold war arms race accelerated the search for ldquodefense in spacerdquogrew more desperate jet bombers atomic bombs hydrogen bombsintercontinental ballistic missiles With each step more frantic urgingto spread the cities into their ldquomarketing areasrdquo Highway systems

Galison | War against the Center 29

Centralized decentralized and distributed networksSource Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

city with some four hundred tons of bombs while the Germans struckdown thirty-six of the attackers The raids continued with some eleventhousand tons of bombs dropped the most destructive of which tookplace on 14 October 1943 Again over two hundred planes descendedon the plant letting loose 450 tons of high explosives and incendiariesdestroying 10 percent of the machinery 20 percent of the stock and350000 square feet of plant German antindashaircraft batteries and ghtersshot down an even greater number of planes than on the earlier bigraid killing some six hundred airmen As a direct result of that attackSpeer near panic put his closest associate Philip Kessler in charge ofprotecting and dispersing the bearing industry By August 1944 whenthe Allies ew an eight-hundred-plane raid against Schweinfurt half thefactory was elsewhere11 Having faced this barrage the Germans braggedat warrsquos end ldquoEs ist kein Geraet zurueck geblieben weil Waelzlagerfehltenrdquo (No equipment was left behind because bearings were lacking)American analysts ought to take the lesson to heart the authors of theStrategic Bombing Survey insisted ldquoeven in the case of a very concen-trated industry very heavy and continuous attack must be made sinceotherwise the enemy if he can survive the initial shock will be able totake successful countermeasuresrdquo12

These target categories airframes and bearings were supposed tohave choked the German war-making capacity Both after a frantic dis-persal lost the vulnerability that the Americans expected Consequentlystarting in spring 1944 Allied strategy broadened in large measurebecause by then they had air superiority over the entirety of GermanyPlanners began to plot two new ldquobottlenecksrdquo to squeeze shut First theoperations analysts began directing airplanes against the synthetic oilindustrymdashthat is oil produced with the massive coal deposits of the

Ruhr They hit the steel industry hard anddrove massive missions against chemicalplants By doing so they aimed simultane-ously to damage the German home economyand to cripple rolling armor at the front

While reporting successful ldquobottleneckrdquoattacks such as the campaign against oil thereport itself was in essence doing its ownreconstruction of the German economymdashand its authors did not hesitate to point outwhere the original planners had failed tofind a vulnerable point For example theylamented that the combined Allied air forceslet loose only 05 percent of their bomb loadon the electrical industry even though the

Galison | War against the Center 11

Opposite Bombs dropped on German bearing targetsSource USSBS

Left German crude steel production Source USSBS

Germans themselves (as Speer later asserted) were terried of an engulf-ing Allied drive against German generating stations Power plants wereconcentrated in a limited number of locations generators could notstockpile their electrical product and the Germans had a terrible timerepairing damaged power stations Perusing captured documents theStrategic Bombing Survey authors reported

The secret minutes of the central planning committee studyingthe power shortage make this weakness clear The difculties ofadding capacity the limitations of the so-called grid system therelationship of curtailment and shortage of electric energy to pro-duction losses in industry and their fears that their extreme vul-nerability would be discovered are all paraded openly in theseminutes made by the Germans in the midst of the war13

Hitting forty-ve plants would have been dangerous for Germany as awholemdasha result they justified by testimony from Speer himself Andthese plants unlike much else could not be dispersed Similarly ldquoamajor opportunity in the Allied air offensive against oil was unexploitedrdquoin that the production of ethyl uid was crucial for aviation fuel andethyl uid required tertraethyl lead There were only two tetraethyl leadplants in Germany These the report insisted should have been hit14

Or again ldquoconcentration on the few synthetic rubber plants as a primarybombing target early in the war would have proven protablerdquo15

Again and again the bomb analysts repeated their message Aerialwarfare worked when it hit concentrated centralized production stand-ing at a functional node upstream of many other industries Bombingfailed when the Germans effectively dispersed their factories Separa-tion in space worked exceedingly well in other sectors Beginning in1934 the Nazis had already scattered their explosive and propellantplants but only in 1944 had they launched (rather unsuccessful)attempts to decentralize plants producing nitrogen (needed for gun-powder) and methanol (crucial for high explosives)16 Similarly Speerand his most valued lieutenant Edmund Geilenberg scrambled des-perately in the nal months of the war to disperse J-2 jet fuel for theirlast-ditch attempt to stem air losses with their new wonder weaponthe jet ghter

2 The Bombsight MirrorWhile they were assessing the air war against Nazi Germany theStrategic Bombing Survey analysts had under way a massive inquiryinto the assault on Japan Without reviewing the bulk of their study ofconventional bombing I want to turn to the report they led on the atomicattacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki That text chronicles the horrific

12 Grey Room 04

effects of the blast separately and methodically outlining its effect onbuildings and bodies by pressure heat and radiation Taking the testi-mony of hundreds of survivors the analysts asked about morale inquiredabout feelings of rebellion toward the government about attitudestoward the United States The bomb surveyors even if briey exploredthe effect of the nuclear devastation on internal high-level Japanesedeliberations about the future of the war

Suddenly in the concluding section of the report the authors took adifferent tack and the tone changed Gone was the absolute distancethe surveyors had managed to maintain toward industrial targets citiesand military objectives All at once the weapons dropped on an enemyjust months before began to appear in an inverted vision in which thosesame weapons appeared turned against the United States

The Surveyrsquos investigators as they proceeded about their studyfound an insistent question framing itself in their minds ldquoWhat ifthe target for the bomb had been an American cityrdquo True the pri-mary mission of the Survey was to ascertain the facts just sum-marized But conclusions as to the meaning of those facts forcitizens of the United States forced themselves almost inescapablyon the men who examined thoughtfully the remains of Hiroshimaand Nagasaki17

Sifting the rubble interviewing the wounded survivors the BombingSurvey investigators began to see similarities between Japanese build-ings and American ones between surviving structures at Hiroshimaand possible shelters in the United States They made it clear in printthat they thought the two nuclear-devastated sites were the best argu-ment against war itself but they also began to speculate on howAmericans might survive the kinds of attacks they themselves had justvisited on the Japanese

The fate of industries in both cities again illustrates the value ofdecentralization All major factories in Hiroshima were on theperiphery of the citymdashand escaped serious damage at Nagasakiplants and dockyards at the southern end of the city were merelyintact but those in the valley where the bomb exploded wereseriously damaged18

Medical facilities typically located in the central parts of the cities lay in smoldering ruins So it had been in Hamburg where survivors of theraids had lain in shock without assistance in their hours of greatest need

Looking at Hiroshima Nagasaki and Hamburg Survey personnelbegan to see their own large cities Already in 1946 they pressed for adramatic shift in the way those cities were conceived

Galison | War against the Center 13

The similar peril of American cities and the extent to which wisezoning has diminished it differ from city to city Though a reshap-ing and partial dispersal of the national centers of activity aredrastic and difcult measures they represent a social and mili-tary ideal toward which very practical steps can be taken once thepolicy has been laid down19

Efforts toward decentralization remained desultory during 1947But already Congress had ordered the National Security ResourcesBoard to begin exploring industrial relocation Abruptly in the sum-mer of 1949 the laissez-faire mood ended For it was in August that theRussians detonated their rst atomic bomb named by the West Joe 1Despite nearly four years of warning that the Russians would probablyhave nuclear weapons within five years of the Trinity test Americanpolicy experts politicians military officers and atomic scientistsreacted with an alarm bordering on panic Called to offer a response tothe Russian bomb in October 1949 the General Advisory Committee(GAC) under J Robert Oppenheimer convened only to harden theirresistance to further escalation of the arms race In a surprising andunanimous vote the GAC recommended against building the hydrogenbomb on moral grounds A weapon of genocide they asserted an ldquoevilunder lightrdquo It was that anti-H-bomb decision soon ratied by the AtomicEnergy Commissioners that sent a ssure straight down the center of acommunity of scientists grown close-knit during the war

The GACrsquos H-bomb report catalyzed a swift hard struggle betweenopponents and proponents of this new category of weapon Lobbyingbegan in secretmdashand then burst into the public arena after a congressionalleak Editorials in newspapers magazines and television erupted onboth sides with debate continuing all the way up to President Harry S Trumanrsquos decision in January 1950 The country would in fact buildthe hydrogen bomb In June 1950 the Korean War beganmdashmobilizationindustrial and military heightened as never before and the govern-ment inaugurated a still-continuing national commitment to a hugemilitary establishment

It was in this context that in August 1951 the president announceda national policy for industrial dispersion and the National SecurityResources Board quickly followed with a booklet entitled Is Your Planta Target that proclaimed ldquoThe risk of an all-out atomic attack on theUnited States grows greater each day since we are no longer the solepossessor of the secret of the atomic bomb This means that no indus-trial area in the Nation can be considered safe from attackrdquo20 To guar-antee survival the National Security Resources Board insisted wouldrequire that productive capacity be protected ldquoThe dispersion (or

14 Grey Room 04

Site selection for securitySource Industrial DispersionNational Security ResourcesBoard Is Your Plant a Target(Washington DC US Govern-ment Printing Of ce 1951)

deployment in space) of new plant development for war-supportingindustries can make American production less vulnerable to attackrdquoSpace could protect men at the battleeld the authors continued andspace by multiplying targets would diminish ldquothe vulnerability of anyone concentrationrdquo

Behind this national program lay four principles First the disper-sion would be of new industries rather than old second ldquono region ofthe country is to be built up at the expense of anotherrdquo third the dis-persion would take place within so-called ldquomarketing areasrdquo and fourthstate and local governments with private industry would initiate thechange and the federal government would encourage and providetechnical guidance

To tempt industrialists the Feds advertised additional benets thatwould accrue to those industries that dispersed better working andliving conditions for workers greater production by avoiding urbancongestion a healthier more stable economy Adding further quitematerial sweeteners to the mix the federal government promised toallocate ldquocerticates of necessityrdquo critical materials emergency loansand defense contracts to those industries that escaped the connes ofurban concentration Reading the booklet the industrialist and thecivic leader could begin asking themselves these questions

The handy cow pasture on the edge of town may look like a goodsite but does it measure up to the all-important security stan-dards Is it strategically located in relation to labor supply fueltransportation and other requirements for efcient and econom-

Galison | War against the Center 15

ical production Is the site properly located in relation to futurehomes shops schools and other community developments Hasfull consideration been given to efcient wartime productionand long-term benets to industry and community When youhave answered these questions you are on the way to developinga sound industrial dispersion program21

Industrialists swarmed toward Washington to assess the new plansGathered under the auspices of the Executive Ofce of the President

the National Security Resources Board assembled the key players on 7September 1951 in the Executive Ofce Building in Washington DC

Jack Small chairman of the Munitions Board told the assembledthat he was more scared now than when he came down to Washingtonsome nine months earlier

In the intervening time that God has given us we have madeprogress in the production of weapons getting new weaponsmade and creating a force strength but we are not yet ready andwe are in really desperate danger in the event that our enemyattacks For Godrsquos sake donrsquot get the idea that this thing isover or that the danger has nished or that these fanatic enemiesof ours have changed their plans or objectives one iota Theyhave not We will have achieved by next year a posture ofmore strength but still it will not be enough strength to pre-vent aggression

The ldquoall-outrdquo could come at any moment Small insisted to the indus-trialists and it could come by intention or by accident There was onlyone hope ldquoSpace is the one thing that really worksrdquo22

Soon however the discussion turned away from plutonium andtoward prots How queried the representatives from Alabama andLouisiana might this dispersion bring industry to their areas and awayfrom the Northeast which already had such access to the federal silverspoon Industrialists wondered aloud how much federal force-feedingthere would be and the ofcials reassured them that they intended inno way to damage business interests lower productivity or threaten a lossof labor supply This was to be dispersion within a marketing areamdashnot wholesale relocation to distant states

Small and his colleagues in dispersion left the audience withsomewhat vague injunctions But the national policy did vastly moreit aimed to make citizens of every community into target analysts oftheir own region As the Bureau of Commerce patiently explainedldquomaterials and methods for identifying the potential target areas aredescribed on the following pagesrdquo23 Those ldquopotential target areasrdquo

16 Grey Room 04

were the cities and towns of the United States Here is how the Commerce Department directed every community

but especially the top 168 metropolitan areas to proceed First checkthe list of industrial classifications and identify all those plantsemploying more than one hundred workers per peak shift These ranfrom industrial inorganic chemicals coke and byproducts to steelmills engines aircraft scientific instruments photographic equip-ment and ordnance Then identify those locations on a map (naturallynot disclosing the precise role of any single plant to unwanted eyes)Combine this information with outlines of heavily populated sectionsfollowing the information of the Census Bureau Lay out two largemaps (one inch equals one mile) showing political subdivisions arterialhighways railroads ports and harbors alongside industrial areas Nextdraw a series of four-inch (four-mile) circles on transparent overlaysmdashthese correspond to the area destroyed by an atomic bomb

Now you are ready to identify your regionrsquos target zones ldquothose areasthat contain sufcient concentrations of industry or population so asto constitute attractive atom-bomb targetsrdquo24 Just ldquoattractive atom-bombtargetsrdquo not sites ldquolikely to be targeted by the Russiansrdquomdashthe reifiedshorthand compresses all those years of wartime and then postwar tar-geting Your goal in what follows is to use these circles to form a targetout of the city as a whole by transecting the four-mile-diameter circlesonce they are judiciously located In particular the full target will contain both valuable defense-related industries (employing 16000workers in toto) or a residential population of 200000 people

Here is the schematic procedureThis region outlined by the dark line encloses the ldquohighly indus-

trialized sectionrdquo as defined by the National Industrial DispersionProgram Next each community is to plot the census tracts on the sec-ond set of working maps At the center of each tract goes a dot and thepopulation Again you overlay a four-mile transparent circle movingit until it circles a population of 200000 When you connect the centersof these 200000-person circles you have formed a ldquodensely populatedsectionrdquo Next join the two maps in such a way as to form a combinedarea embracing the high density of regions of both industry and popu-lation This joint region the Commerce Department declared wouldbe known as a potential A-bomb target zone From that zone measureten inches (ten miles) out to form the dispersal limit line There is yourgoal Locate all future critical industry and its associated populationspast the line of safety taking care not to create inadvertently a secondarypotential A-bomb target zone

These maps were not designed just to scare they would form witha factory proposal an application for a ldquocerticate of necessityrdquo (granting

Galison | War against the Center 17

18 Grey Room 04

Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo

Boundary of highly industrial ized section

Census-tract population centers with population gures

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of highly industrialized section

Galison | War against the Center 19

Top row left to right Self-targeting step I Take the listof government designated defense-related industries and plot theirlocation and employment This isthe rst task towards the construc-tion of areas known as the highlyindustrialized sections Source USDepartment of Commerce Indus-trial Dispersion Guidebook forCommunities Domestic CommerceSeries no 31 (Washington DCUS Government Printing Of ce1952)

Self-targeting step II To completethe construction of the perimeterof the highly industrialized sectionsdraw circles of four-mile radiusconnect centers of circles contain-ing more than 16000 workersSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step III Label populations from census tractsSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Bottom row left to right Self-targeting step IV To completethe construction of the denselypopulated sections draw circles offour-mile radius and connect thecenters of circles with more than200000 inhabitants SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Self-targeting step V Now super-impose the highly industrializedarea on the densely populatedarea Taken together they form the potential A-bomb Target zoneSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step VI Drawingthe potential A-bomb target zoneon a regional map planners shouldnow construct a safety margin often miles from the outside of theendangered area All new industrialplants should be dispersed out-side this ten-mile radius SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Census-tract population centers with population gures

accelerated tax amortization) facilitating the approval of defense loansand securing defense contracts

Bombing the Axis economy and dispersing the American one werereflections of one another When Charles E Wilson director of theOffice of Defense Mobilization came before the National SecurityResources Board of the Presidentrsquos Executive Office he needed anexpert on how to disperse industry To the captains of industry assem-bled for a 1951 hearing Wilson sought to justify his strictures aboutsplitting plants by ten or twenty miles ldquoMr Gorrie brought me a realexpert on that I call him a real expert because he was one of the menwho had done bombing in the industrial arena of Germany and cer-tainly he convinced me that 10 or 20 miles provides reasonable safetyrdquo25

Bombers braced for bombsIn 1952 Project East River (Associated Universities contracted to the

federal government) reported on how Washington could drive indus-try outside the expanding urban areas ldquoleapfroggingrdquo away from urbancores One role was to create ldquopublic understandingrdquo of the need forldquosatellite townrdquo planning and its defense use More materially theEast River gang reported the federal government should provide aidto assist in the construction of urban arteries to the satellite towns pro-vide rent subsidies to small businesses send appropriations to matchmetropolitan planning units offer tax assistance for new constructionin outlying areas demand dispersal to qualify for federal defenseinsurance and promote federal loans and grants for the constructionof outlying schools streets water and sewers The government shouldsubsidize ring roads around citiesmdashlike Route 128 around Bostonmdashand strive to locate defense industry on it Above all the fast-increas-ing population ofce building and industry heading into cities had tobe reversed Throughout constant vigilance against the re-creation ofnew centers26

Eponymously the report took as its ldquoarea studyrdquo the imagined caseof a Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapon detonated several thousand feetabove a 260-acre rectangle in Manhattan adjacent to the East RiverWith detailed information about the age structure and flammabilityof individual buildingsmdashand recent census datamdashthis not-so-typicalpiece of America could then be tracked as it shattered and burnedunder the assault of nuclear attack How many of the 35000 peopleresiding between 59th and 72nd Streets (between 3rd Avenue and theriver) would become casualties if a weapon were to be exploded at 2 AM How many minutesrsquo warning would they have to take shelterHow much radiation would they receive Would a firestorm eruptBased principally on the results of the US Strategic Bombing Surveyon Hiroshima and Nagasaki this report was in a sense a dully terrifying

20 Grey Room 04

answer to the question the Bombing Survey had posed seven years earlier What would the bombs that were let loose over Hiroshima havelooked like were they to have been dropped back home27

Under the guidance of these various boards and the lucrative drawof taxes loans and contracts one by one key industrial and civic leaderslearned to see themselves through the reflection of a bombsight Oneby one they began plotting their own dispersion In September 1955for example the Chemical and Engineering News reported on atomicvulnerability in the chemical process industry Nuclear weapons jetairplanes and the concept of total war combined wrote Neil P HurleySJ to blur the distinction between military force and industrial poten-tial The role of an industrymdashits functional interdependence on otherindustriesmdashxed the likelihood of its plants becoming targets Chemical-process industries were vulnerable on two fronts geographic concen-tration and functional criticality The conclusion was as inevitable asit was fearsome ldquoThree well-directed H-bombs on these key targetareas would have serious consequences for the industrial chemicalproducing complexrdquo28 Two-thirds of workers making industrial chem-icals lived in ten states

American chemical dispersion in 1955 was directly and explicitlylinked to German chemical dispersion in 1945 Over and over againHurley cited the Strategic Bombing Survey ldquoIt is worth noting thatantifriction bearings represented an Achilles heel in the German econ-omy in World War II The Strategic Bombing Survey indicated a paral-ysis of German industry following Allied air force bombings ofSchweinfurt where more than 50 of German antifriction bearingswere producedrdquo Four H-bombs for example could wipe out half the UScapacity to produce instruments and related products ldquoUnfortunatelythe US has many Schweinfurts In the Great Lakes region are to befound 47 of the nonelectrical machinery productionrdquo A saturationattack on that regionmdashand saturation would not take many bombsmdashwould Hurley noted destroy a vast array of industries including thatof chemicals29

Throughout the 1950s the Strategic Bombing Survey remained cen-tral to thinking about nuclear warfare and the dispersion of industryHurley for example in constructing his report on American chemicalpriorities reproduced the Surveyrsquos list of the ten most vital chemicalsfor the German war effort from nitrogen methanol and calcium car-bide down to caustic soda chlorine and sodium carbonate He reca-pitulated the Surveyrsquos conclusions about the shortages of nitric acid onthe manufacture of explosives the reduction of methanol that cut intothe making of high explosives and the Germansrsquo vain last-ditch effortsto create underground factories In this new narrative Americans

Galison | War against the Center 21

played the role previously performed by Germans Russians took overthe bombing role from the Allies Those who had used their knowledgeof American industry had planned the strategic bombing of the Axisnow they became the potential bombing victims readying plans to disperse Here is Hurley

To avoid a repetition in this country of the unfortunate experi-ences of the Germans during World War II necessary moves mustbe made before any outbreak of hostilities The Germans enjoyedthe luxury of learning from their mistakes It is highly doubtfulwhether in the atomic age any nation will have the same oppor-tunitymdashone mistake may well be the last30

Dispersal could aid in reconstruction and also preventionmdasha strongernation ldquoprotected in spacerdquo (as the phrase went) would deter any attacker

Admiral Ben Moreell retired from the Navy and in the mid-1950schairman of Jones amp Laughlin Steel Corporation had just presented tothe secretary of commerce the manifesto of the purposes of the Ironand Steel Advisory Council The council had urged a mobilization planfor steel in light of the threat presented by high-speed jet airplaneslong-range missiles and nuclear weapons that ldquoour prospectiveenemyrdquo might at any time hurl without warning Big steel needed acomplete control center one linked by telegraph and radio to the steel-making plants Admiral Moreell and his fellow advisers emphasizedthe proximate danger of Russians with H-bombs and in fact asMoreell noted they had one just a few days after his committee laid itsreport at Commerce Worriedly the admiral allowed that 75 percent ofAmerican steelmaking capacity could be destroyed by a mere tenhydrogen bombs The councilrsquos recommendation disperse 25 percentof the capacity in such a way that the resulting plants would be splitup into numerous single-function plants providing each plant with atleast three alternative modes for transporting its products It was timeMoreell intoned to take similar measures in a host of other industriesincluding rubber copper glass aluminum textiles automobiles andelectrical products Prepare for real costs for steel alone the disper-sion bill would run to some $10 billion

Moreell ldquoPerhaps I have overemphasized the hazard under whichwe now live I do not believe so The facts which are coming out withrespect to the tactics and policies of the Communist enemy in Chinaand Korea added to what we already know about them justify the con-clusion that we are facing a ruthless adversary who will permit nohumane consideration to inuence his decisions who will strike with-out prior warning and whose ambition is to rule the worldrdquo31

Dispersion might help the admiral concluded Like so much of this lit-

22 Grey Room 04

Opposite top Where the steelindustry is concentrated Source Admiral Ben MoreellldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do toUS Industriesrdquo US News andWorld Report 7 May 1954

Opposite bottom Destroyingsteel Source Moreell ldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do to USIndustriesrdquo

erature issues of protability and patriotism stood side by side and heconcluded under the ag gesturing to the Founding Father ldquoIn timeof peace prepare for warrdquo

Preparations advanced In 1956 Industrial Development a nationalmagazine dedicated to ldquoarea analysis and business site selectionrdquoreported that the Ofce of Area Development had reviewed and approvedsome fty-eight of the self-prepared urban area surveys Money talkedBy mid-June 1955 projects valued at $30 billion had qualied for taxabatements under the program

Take Milwaukee In December 1953 the cityrsquos mayor Frank Zeidlertraveled to the White House where the president addressed some twohundred large-city mayors in stark terms ldquoFor the rst time in historycities have become principal targets for an enemy seeking to conquerour nation The city has moved from a position of support in the rear Ithas moved out into the front linerdquo Immediately Zeidler arrangedto meet with the Wisconsin governor and the mayors of RacineMadison and Green Joining the chorus of civil defense authorities themayors agreed that in the short term they would need plans for rapidevacuation in the event of a nuclear attack at the same time theyneeded to begin longer-term planning for the dispersal of the city By

Galison | War against the Center 23

May 1954 Milwaukee had its report ldquoNew building in the core of anurban target [ought to] be prohibited except when it replaces existingstructures This is intended to halt the pouring of greater target valuesinto areas which are already richly rewarding as targetsrdquo Spreadingindustry wasnrsquot all that the report advocated The new region wouldneed new school districts novel tax structures and alternative typesof local governments Zoning would force dispersal from the centerinstitute bands of open space and deliver industrial plants to hinter-lands deliberately bypassed by major radial or circumferential roads inorder to avoid creating secondary concentrations ldquoThere is little doubtrdquothe reportrsquos author reckoned ldquothat some of [these] measures wouldhave to be fought through the Supreme Court before they were acceptedby allrdquo32 Pressed by national codes taxes defense spending andimprecations by the president on down local and federal authoritiescompeted to outdo the other in the rush away from the targeted center

America was not alone in declaring war on the urban center Canadain the midst of a major effort to plan urban growth in 1956 also begandefensive dispersal The Ofce of the Civil Defence Coordinator in col-laboration with the Defence Research Board and McGill Universityprepared a Guide to Urban Dispersal ldquoDispersal is the characteristicof present day urban growthrdquo the authors asserted Satellite towns andvillages made urban regions the right scale on which to re-think pat-terns of communication government and demography ldquoDefence iscritical In modern warfare the initial blow is struck at the civilian pop-ulation to destroy at a stroke the ability to resist The greatest vulnera-bility lies in urban concentrationmdashthe greatest security would beachieved by urban dispersalrdquo That dispersal would follow a survey ofa ring located an H-bomb radius away from the regional center That is

24 Grey Room 04

where the Guide came in Based in part on a real area and in part ongeneric characteristics the book was a how-to manual for planning thescattering of the urban into the regional Slope of the land location ofwater avenues of communication and transport needs all had to bereckoned The Guide instructed local leaders and planners how to dia-gram all this for their future Satellite towns would perch outside thering of safetymdashtowns that under no circumstances ought to attractmore than forty thousand inhabitants Ultimately government-pro-pelled ldquourban regionsrdquo would replace the ldquoamorphous formrdquo of currentmetropolitan development alleviating social and economic problemswhile securing spatial defense against thermonuclear attack33 City bycity country by country the bomb helped drive dispersion Indeedcoming full circle the Germans already all too familiar with aerialbombardment began preparing for a rain of hydrogen bombsHannover Bremen and Duumlsseldorf issued the rst three analyses andothers would follow Their comprehensive treatments covered the sta-tus of police re hospital postal service and road service followinga nuclear attack34

Preparation for atomic war was certainly on President Dwight DEisenhowerrsquos mind as he strove to resuscitate the long-debated federalhighway system Franklin D Roosevelt had pushed the idea in the1930s not least for its promise of providing jobs Reports rolled in TheBureau of Public Roads undertook one in 1938 and the chairman ofthat organization presided over another called Interregional Highwaysdated 1943 Other reports and standards marched on through the warwith some actually leading to road buildingmdashin 1947 crews began cut-ting the rst miles of interstate highways Still by the time Eisenhowercame into office in January 1953 there were but six thousand or somiles of road improvements actually on the ground (at a cost of nearly$1 billion)

Eisenhower liked highways He had struggled across the country ina motorized convoy back in 1919 an unpleasant sixty-two days of slip-ping on ice sticking in mud breaking into wooden bridges and freez-ing under snow The contrast with Germany was stark As SupremeCommander General Eisenhower had been astonished by the auto-bahns taking particular note of the advantages that road system affordedas he had to move masses of men and mateacuteriel across the conqueredReich ldquoGermany made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons acrossthe landrdquo On July 12 1954 Vice President Richard Nixon facing theconference of state governors at Lake George New York read fromEisenhowerrsquos prepared speech and the message was clear The obso-lete network had to go its antiquated byways were clogging the roadsand courts while leaving a death toll on the citizenry comparable to

Galison | War against the Center 25

Industrial dispersal 1956 Solidcircles show cities where dispersalplans were approved by late 1955dotted circles indicate communi-ties where plans were under prepa-ration Source Theodore K PasmaldquoIndustrial Dispersal 1956rdquo Indus-trial Development The NationalMagazine of Area Analysis andBusiness Site Selection (January-February 1956)

ldquoa bloody warrdquo But Eisenhowerrsquos final jab at the current system wasstark holding up for public contemplation its ldquoappalling inadequaciesto meet the demands of catastrophe or defense should an atomic warcomerdquo35 Radial roads would afford clear routes for city evacuationCircumferential roads Project East River had recommended back in1952 should be encouraged wherever possible to drain industry andpopulation from the dense city centers36 In fact highway designersconsulted with federal civil defense agencies and military plannersaimed for interstate highways that would bypass urban areas to avoidldquoroute[s] that had suffered a direct A-bomb hitrdquo37 It took two years ofpolitical wrangling and it goes without saying that economic housingand non-nuclear forces for the interstate were surely among its powerfulmotors By the end of 1956 the Interstate and Defense Highway Systemhad fundingmdashsome $25 billion of federal support38

3 Distributed KnowledgeBy 1960 the Air Force began dreaming worse nightmares than nuke-ladenbombers bullying their way past ghter defense Atomic strikes againstthe continental United States could be launched with missiles forwhich range of ight was no longer an issue The RAND Corporationmade its mark with contracts to think about this thermonuclear threatfrom the new think tank issued shelves of studies including thefamous (and famously parodied) volume by Herman Kahn On Thermo-nuclear War Just as Kahn stepped into the limelight the much lesswell known Paul Baran an electrical engineer coming from HughesAircraft Companyrsquos systems group joined RAND His job was todevelop a scheme that would ensure the survival of the US telecom-munications infrastructure through a Russian rst strikemdasha vital linknot only for domestic communication but also for command and con-trol His response in a series of papers launched in 1960 was a plan toremove completely critical nodes from the telephone system Like thethree highways many wanted from each dispersed defense plantBaranrsquos vision aimed for safety in redundantly connected spatially dis-tributed mini-centers

Here is how Baran put it in one of his rst papers

The cloud-of-doom attitude that nuclear war spells the end of theearth is slowly lifting from the minds of the many Better quanti-tative estimates of post-attack destruction together with a lessemotional discussion of the alternatives may mark the end of theldquowhat the hellmdashwhatrsquos the userdquo era A new view emerges the pos-sibility of a war exists but there is much that can be done to min-imize the consequences

26 Grey Room 04

De nition of redundancy Paul Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunications I Introductionto Distributed CommunicationsNetworkrdquo RAND Corporationmemorandum RM-3420-PRAugust 1964

Survivable atomic warmdashthe goal of the fteen-year struggle since theSurvey crew picked through the still radioactive rubble at HiroshimaBaran again

If war does not mean the end of the earth in a black and whitemanner then it follows that we should do those things that makethe shade of gray as light as possible to plan now to minimizepotential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permitthe survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstructthe economy swiftly39

That reconstruction demanded the elimination of the hierarchical center alternately referred to over these rst decades of the cold war asthe linchpin the bottleneck and the node

The problem as Baran formulated it did involve new equipment tolabel digitally each packet of information with a ldquotordquo and ldquofromrdquo andthen to route these fragments over diverse paths toward their eventualreassembly on arrival But before anything could be built moved dig-itized or reinforced the conceptual problem required attention Thatreconceptualization now took as it had not before a mathematicalform If nodes were replaced with redundant links how could heexploit the information-theoretic approach of Claude Shannon to countthe surviving paths between points in the array

Here is how Baran reasoned

Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network whichwill allow several hundred major communications stations to talkwith one another after an enemy attack As a criterion of surviv-ability we elect to use the percentage of stations both survivingthe physical attack and remaining in electrical connection withthe largest single group of surviving stations This criterion ischosen as a conservative measure of the ability of the survivingstations to operate together as a coherent entity after the attack40

With the result that a redundancy of at least R = 3would ensure a likely survival rate of nearly 75 percentBaran could now sketch the distributed system thatwould vouchsafe communication after nuclear war

Worst obviously was the centralized node that rep-resented the single critical target This was the situationwith concentrated steel electricity or oil plants it wasthe structure of the hubbed railway system It was inshort the bombing plannerrsquos dream and the bombingvictimrsquos nightmare Decentralized nodes that main-tained a local hierarchical structure were clearly better

Galison | War against the Center 27

a complete grid structure was best of all To a certain extent such gridsstood for the defensive ideal of dispersion more generally By increasingthe number of targets one decreased the likelihood of incapacitationHalting abortive and awkward though it was Baranrsquos scheme (alongwith a similar one developed in England) slowly wended its way throughdifferent incarnations in the ARPANET and Milnet But the elusivegoal all through these decades of distributed communication was a dis-tributed grid or mesh a thrust in the rst instance aimed at removingthe critical node Though in the garb of nuclear survivability the gridmay not appear as the redemptive Internet of our dreams that tech-nology grew directly out of fifteen years of longing for a world stillstanding after thermonuclear war41

4 We Are Become TargetsDuring the years of World War II American and British planners andanalysts learned to see through a bombsight Not in a single glimpsebut in the routine killings and losses that accompanied ever more fre-quently repeated raids Twenty-four hours a day day after day monthafter month year after year the planners and analysts studied andrestudied the interdependencies of the German economy circled tar-gets blasted factories leveled cities analyzed the damage and struckagain Chemicals nitric acid methanol Basic materials rubber steeloil aviation gas Transport systems electrical generators And popula-tion centers area bombing by the combined American and Britishforces killed some 600000 Germans In a war that the Nazis renderedever more vicious even as their defeat seemed inevitable the Americansrsquoearly dreams of precision bombing went by the way Two hundredplanes over Schweinfurt then four hundred but also Hamburg LuumlbeckMuumlnster Berlin Dresden Regensburg year after year Measuring bombloads accuracies reconstruction time 35 ton of bombs per acre toinduce damage of 8 percent delay time for reconstruction two and a

28 Grey Room 04

half months A calculus of fractions probabilities delaysBy the warrsquos end a new category of analyst had come into existence

more often than not social scientists and industrialists but also human-ists diplomats mathematicians and natural scientists Piecing togetherfragments of intelligence examining reconnaissance photographs theypainted an elaborate portrait of a wartime foe By warrsquos end the Surveyanalysts had come to see German and Japanese cities through what onemight call a ldquodestructive functionalismrdquo dependencies leading back-ward they kept hoping to the ever-elusive linchpin that when pulledwould topple the structure Schweinfurt was supposed to be one suchpoint with its all-important bearing factories And after Schweinfurtthere were other ldquobottlenecksrdquo to be targeted other cities other plantsother transshipment points

Perhaps before Hiroshima the bombsight eye had already begun toreect back I donrsquot know But in the atomic rubble as the analysts inter-viewed hundreds of blast survivors and canvassed the broken struc-tures as they methodically noted which kinds of concrete walls stillstood at various radii of destruction they began quite explicitly to seethemselves to see America through the bombardierrsquos eye They beganto wonder what an American city would look like after the bomb hadfallen Returning to the United States and publishing their StrategicBombing Survey things began to look different They began to see them-selves their towns and factories on the crosshairs of radial targetingmaps Far from a technological determinism the all-too material tech-nologies and concepts of self were fully imbricated

One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics launched when NorbertWiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedbackmachine that could be mimicked electronically from there it was a shortstep to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way Then humanphysiology began to appear as a cybernetic system then the humanmind then life then even the world system as a whole42 Somewherein the midst of total war a technocratic vision of a technical EnemyOther rose to become a vision of ourselves It was but a heartbeat beforecybernetics saturated the writings of Gregory Bateson and MargaretMead not to speak of philosophers planners and architects

But the consequence was this Three years before the Russians hadthe bomb in fact before on just about anyonersquos account the cold warhad begun American analysts were already advocating a massive dis-persion of factories and populations against atomic aerial attack

As the cold war arms race accelerated the search for ldquodefense in spacerdquogrew more desperate jet bombers atomic bombs hydrogen bombsintercontinental ballistic missiles With each step more frantic urgingto spread the cities into their ldquomarketing areasrdquo Highway systems

Galison | War against the Center 29

Centralized decentralized and distributed networksSource Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

Germans themselves (as Speer later asserted) were terried of an engulf-ing Allied drive against German generating stations Power plants wereconcentrated in a limited number of locations generators could notstockpile their electrical product and the Germans had a terrible timerepairing damaged power stations Perusing captured documents theStrategic Bombing Survey authors reported

The secret minutes of the central planning committee studyingthe power shortage make this weakness clear The difculties ofadding capacity the limitations of the so-called grid system therelationship of curtailment and shortage of electric energy to pro-duction losses in industry and their fears that their extreme vul-nerability would be discovered are all paraded openly in theseminutes made by the Germans in the midst of the war13

Hitting forty-ve plants would have been dangerous for Germany as awholemdasha result they justified by testimony from Speer himself Andthese plants unlike much else could not be dispersed Similarly ldquoamajor opportunity in the Allied air offensive against oil was unexploitedrdquoin that the production of ethyl uid was crucial for aviation fuel andethyl uid required tertraethyl lead There were only two tetraethyl leadplants in Germany These the report insisted should have been hit14

Or again ldquoconcentration on the few synthetic rubber plants as a primarybombing target early in the war would have proven protablerdquo15

Again and again the bomb analysts repeated their message Aerialwarfare worked when it hit concentrated centralized production stand-ing at a functional node upstream of many other industries Bombingfailed when the Germans effectively dispersed their factories Separa-tion in space worked exceedingly well in other sectors Beginning in1934 the Nazis had already scattered their explosive and propellantplants but only in 1944 had they launched (rather unsuccessful)attempts to decentralize plants producing nitrogen (needed for gun-powder) and methanol (crucial for high explosives)16 Similarly Speerand his most valued lieutenant Edmund Geilenberg scrambled des-perately in the nal months of the war to disperse J-2 jet fuel for theirlast-ditch attempt to stem air losses with their new wonder weaponthe jet ghter

2 The Bombsight MirrorWhile they were assessing the air war against Nazi Germany theStrategic Bombing Survey analysts had under way a massive inquiryinto the assault on Japan Without reviewing the bulk of their study ofconventional bombing I want to turn to the report they led on the atomicattacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki That text chronicles the horrific

12 Grey Room 04

effects of the blast separately and methodically outlining its effect onbuildings and bodies by pressure heat and radiation Taking the testi-mony of hundreds of survivors the analysts asked about morale inquiredabout feelings of rebellion toward the government about attitudestoward the United States The bomb surveyors even if briey exploredthe effect of the nuclear devastation on internal high-level Japanesedeliberations about the future of the war

Suddenly in the concluding section of the report the authors took adifferent tack and the tone changed Gone was the absolute distancethe surveyors had managed to maintain toward industrial targets citiesand military objectives All at once the weapons dropped on an enemyjust months before began to appear in an inverted vision in which thosesame weapons appeared turned against the United States

The Surveyrsquos investigators as they proceeded about their studyfound an insistent question framing itself in their minds ldquoWhat ifthe target for the bomb had been an American cityrdquo True the pri-mary mission of the Survey was to ascertain the facts just sum-marized But conclusions as to the meaning of those facts forcitizens of the United States forced themselves almost inescapablyon the men who examined thoughtfully the remains of Hiroshimaand Nagasaki17

Sifting the rubble interviewing the wounded survivors the BombingSurvey investigators began to see similarities between Japanese build-ings and American ones between surviving structures at Hiroshimaand possible shelters in the United States They made it clear in printthat they thought the two nuclear-devastated sites were the best argu-ment against war itself but they also began to speculate on howAmericans might survive the kinds of attacks they themselves had justvisited on the Japanese

The fate of industries in both cities again illustrates the value ofdecentralization All major factories in Hiroshima were on theperiphery of the citymdashand escaped serious damage at Nagasakiplants and dockyards at the southern end of the city were merelyintact but those in the valley where the bomb exploded wereseriously damaged18

Medical facilities typically located in the central parts of the cities lay in smoldering ruins So it had been in Hamburg where survivors of theraids had lain in shock without assistance in their hours of greatest need

Looking at Hiroshima Nagasaki and Hamburg Survey personnelbegan to see their own large cities Already in 1946 they pressed for adramatic shift in the way those cities were conceived

Galison | War against the Center 13

The similar peril of American cities and the extent to which wisezoning has diminished it differ from city to city Though a reshap-ing and partial dispersal of the national centers of activity aredrastic and difcult measures they represent a social and mili-tary ideal toward which very practical steps can be taken once thepolicy has been laid down19

Efforts toward decentralization remained desultory during 1947But already Congress had ordered the National Security ResourcesBoard to begin exploring industrial relocation Abruptly in the sum-mer of 1949 the laissez-faire mood ended For it was in August that theRussians detonated their rst atomic bomb named by the West Joe 1Despite nearly four years of warning that the Russians would probablyhave nuclear weapons within five years of the Trinity test Americanpolicy experts politicians military officers and atomic scientistsreacted with an alarm bordering on panic Called to offer a response tothe Russian bomb in October 1949 the General Advisory Committee(GAC) under J Robert Oppenheimer convened only to harden theirresistance to further escalation of the arms race In a surprising andunanimous vote the GAC recommended against building the hydrogenbomb on moral grounds A weapon of genocide they asserted an ldquoevilunder lightrdquo It was that anti-H-bomb decision soon ratied by the AtomicEnergy Commissioners that sent a ssure straight down the center of acommunity of scientists grown close-knit during the war

The GACrsquos H-bomb report catalyzed a swift hard struggle betweenopponents and proponents of this new category of weapon Lobbyingbegan in secretmdashand then burst into the public arena after a congressionalleak Editorials in newspapers magazines and television erupted onboth sides with debate continuing all the way up to President Harry S Trumanrsquos decision in January 1950 The country would in fact buildthe hydrogen bomb In June 1950 the Korean War beganmdashmobilizationindustrial and military heightened as never before and the govern-ment inaugurated a still-continuing national commitment to a hugemilitary establishment

It was in this context that in August 1951 the president announceda national policy for industrial dispersion and the National SecurityResources Board quickly followed with a booklet entitled Is Your Planta Target that proclaimed ldquoThe risk of an all-out atomic attack on theUnited States grows greater each day since we are no longer the solepossessor of the secret of the atomic bomb This means that no indus-trial area in the Nation can be considered safe from attackrdquo20 To guar-antee survival the National Security Resources Board insisted wouldrequire that productive capacity be protected ldquoThe dispersion (or

14 Grey Room 04

Site selection for securitySource Industrial DispersionNational Security ResourcesBoard Is Your Plant a Target(Washington DC US Govern-ment Printing Of ce 1951)

deployment in space) of new plant development for war-supportingindustries can make American production less vulnerable to attackrdquoSpace could protect men at the battleeld the authors continued andspace by multiplying targets would diminish ldquothe vulnerability of anyone concentrationrdquo

Behind this national program lay four principles First the disper-sion would be of new industries rather than old second ldquono region ofthe country is to be built up at the expense of anotherrdquo third the dis-persion would take place within so-called ldquomarketing areasrdquo and fourthstate and local governments with private industry would initiate thechange and the federal government would encourage and providetechnical guidance

To tempt industrialists the Feds advertised additional benets thatwould accrue to those industries that dispersed better working andliving conditions for workers greater production by avoiding urbancongestion a healthier more stable economy Adding further quitematerial sweeteners to the mix the federal government promised toallocate ldquocerticates of necessityrdquo critical materials emergency loansand defense contracts to those industries that escaped the connes ofurban concentration Reading the booklet the industrialist and thecivic leader could begin asking themselves these questions

The handy cow pasture on the edge of town may look like a goodsite but does it measure up to the all-important security stan-dards Is it strategically located in relation to labor supply fueltransportation and other requirements for efcient and econom-

Galison | War against the Center 15

ical production Is the site properly located in relation to futurehomes shops schools and other community developments Hasfull consideration been given to efcient wartime productionand long-term benets to industry and community When youhave answered these questions you are on the way to developinga sound industrial dispersion program21

Industrialists swarmed toward Washington to assess the new plansGathered under the auspices of the Executive Ofce of the President

the National Security Resources Board assembled the key players on 7September 1951 in the Executive Ofce Building in Washington DC

Jack Small chairman of the Munitions Board told the assembledthat he was more scared now than when he came down to Washingtonsome nine months earlier

In the intervening time that God has given us we have madeprogress in the production of weapons getting new weaponsmade and creating a force strength but we are not yet ready andwe are in really desperate danger in the event that our enemyattacks For Godrsquos sake donrsquot get the idea that this thing isover or that the danger has nished or that these fanatic enemiesof ours have changed their plans or objectives one iota Theyhave not We will have achieved by next year a posture ofmore strength but still it will not be enough strength to pre-vent aggression

The ldquoall-outrdquo could come at any moment Small insisted to the indus-trialists and it could come by intention or by accident There was onlyone hope ldquoSpace is the one thing that really worksrdquo22

Soon however the discussion turned away from plutonium andtoward prots How queried the representatives from Alabama andLouisiana might this dispersion bring industry to their areas and awayfrom the Northeast which already had such access to the federal silverspoon Industrialists wondered aloud how much federal force-feedingthere would be and the ofcials reassured them that they intended inno way to damage business interests lower productivity or threaten a lossof labor supply This was to be dispersion within a marketing areamdashnot wholesale relocation to distant states

Small and his colleagues in dispersion left the audience withsomewhat vague injunctions But the national policy did vastly moreit aimed to make citizens of every community into target analysts oftheir own region As the Bureau of Commerce patiently explainedldquomaterials and methods for identifying the potential target areas aredescribed on the following pagesrdquo23 Those ldquopotential target areasrdquo

16 Grey Room 04

were the cities and towns of the United States Here is how the Commerce Department directed every community

but especially the top 168 metropolitan areas to proceed First checkthe list of industrial classifications and identify all those plantsemploying more than one hundred workers per peak shift These ranfrom industrial inorganic chemicals coke and byproducts to steelmills engines aircraft scientific instruments photographic equip-ment and ordnance Then identify those locations on a map (naturallynot disclosing the precise role of any single plant to unwanted eyes)Combine this information with outlines of heavily populated sectionsfollowing the information of the Census Bureau Lay out two largemaps (one inch equals one mile) showing political subdivisions arterialhighways railroads ports and harbors alongside industrial areas Nextdraw a series of four-inch (four-mile) circles on transparent overlaysmdashthese correspond to the area destroyed by an atomic bomb

Now you are ready to identify your regionrsquos target zones ldquothose areasthat contain sufcient concentrations of industry or population so asto constitute attractive atom-bomb targetsrdquo24 Just ldquoattractive atom-bombtargetsrdquo not sites ldquolikely to be targeted by the Russiansrdquomdashthe reifiedshorthand compresses all those years of wartime and then postwar tar-geting Your goal in what follows is to use these circles to form a targetout of the city as a whole by transecting the four-mile-diameter circlesonce they are judiciously located In particular the full target will contain both valuable defense-related industries (employing 16000workers in toto) or a residential population of 200000 people

Here is the schematic procedureThis region outlined by the dark line encloses the ldquohighly indus-

trialized sectionrdquo as defined by the National Industrial DispersionProgram Next each community is to plot the census tracts on the sec-ond set of working maps At the center of each tract goes a dot and thepopulation Again you overlay a four-mile transparent circle movingit until it circles a population of 200000 When you connect the centersof these 200000-person circles you have formed a ldquodensely populatedsectionrdquo Next join the two maps in such a way as to form a combinedarea embracing the high density of regions of both industry and popu-lation This joint region the Commerce Department declared wouldbe known as a potential A-bomb target zone From that zone measureten inches (ten miles) out to form the dispersal limit line There is yourgoal Locate all future critical industry and its associated populationspast the line of safety taking care not to create inadvertently a secondarypotential A-bomb target zone

These maps were not designed just to scare they would form witha factory proposal an application for a ldquocerticate of necessityrdquo (granting

Galison | War against the Center 17

18 Grey Room 04

Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo

Boundary of highly industrial ized section

Census-tract population centers with population gures

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of highly industrialized section

Galison | War against the Center 19

Top row left to right Self-targeting step I Take the listof government designated defense-related industries and plot theirlocation and employment This isthe rst task towards the construc-tion of areas known as the highlyindustrialized sections Source USDepartment of Commerce Indus-trial Dispersion Guidebook forCommunities Domestic CommerceSeries no 31 (Washington DCUS Government Printing Of ce1952)

Self-targeting step II To completethe construction of the perimeterof the highly industrialized sectionsdraw circles of four-mile radiusconnect centers of circles contain-ing more than 16000 workersSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step III Label populations from census tractsSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Bottom row left to right Self-targeting step IV To completethe construction of the denselypopulated sections draw circles offour-mile radius and connect thecenters of circles with more than200000 inhabitants SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Self-targeting step V Now super-impose the highly industrializedarea on the densely populatedarea Taken together they form the potential A-bomb Target zoneSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step VI Drawingthe potential A-bomb target zoneon a regional map planners shouldnow construct a safety margin often miles from the outside of theendangered area All new industrialplants should be dispersed out-side this ten-mile radius SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Census-tract population centers with population gures

accelerated tax amortization) facilitating the approval of defense loansand securing defense contracts

Bombing the Axis economy and dispersing the American one werereflections of one another When Charles E Wilson director of theOffice of Defense Mobilization came before the National SecurityResources Board of the Presidentrsquos Executive Office he needed anexpert on how to disperse industry To the captains of industry assem-bled for a 1951 hearing Wilson sought to justify his strictures aboutsplitting plants by ten or twenty miles ldquoMr Gorrie brought me a realexpert on that I call him a real expert because he was one of the menwho had done bombing in the industrial arena of Germany and cer-tainly he convinced me that 10 or 20 miles provides reasonable safetyrdquo25

Bombers braced for bombsIn 1952 Project East River (Associated Universities contracted to the

federal government) reported on how Washington could drive indus-try outside the expanding urban areas ldquoleapfroggingrdquo away from urbancores One role was to create ldquopublic understandingrdquo of the need forldquosatellite townrdquo planning and its defense use More materially theEast River gang reported the federal government should provide aidto assist in the construction of urban arteries to the satellite towns pro-vide rent subsidies to small businesses send appropriations to matchmetropolitan planning units offer tax assistance for new constructionin outlying areas demand dispersal to qualify for federal defenseinsurance and promote federal loans and grants for the constructionof outlying schools streets water and sewers The government shouldsubsidize ring roads around citiesmdashlike Route 128 around Bostonmdashand strive to locate defense industry on it Above all the fast-increas-ing population ofce building and industry heading into cities had tobe reversed Throughout constant vigilance against the re-creation ofnew centers26

Eponymously the report took as its ldquoarea studyrdquo the imagined caseof a Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapon detonated several thousand feetabove a 260-acre rectangle in Manhattan adjacent to the East RiverWith detailed information about the age structure and flammabilityof individual buildingsmdashand recent census datamdashthis not-so-typicalpiece of America could then be tracked as it shattered and burnedunder the assault of nuclear attack How many of the 35000 peopleresiding between 59th and 72nd Streets (between 3rd Avenue and theriver) would become casualties if a weapon were to be exploded at 2 AM How many minutesrsquo warning would they have to take shelterHow much radiation would they receive Would a firestorm eruptBased principally on the results of the US Strategic Bombing Surveyon Hiroshima and Nagasaki this report was in a sense a dully terrifying

20 Grey Room 04

answer to the question the Bombing Survey had posed seven years earlier What would the bombs that were let loose over Hiroshima havelooked like were they to have been dropped back home27

Under the guidance of these various boards and the lucrative drawof taxes loans and contracts one by one key industrial and civic leaderslearned to see themselves through the reflection of a bombsight Oneby one they began plotting their own dispersion In September 1955for example the Chemical and Engineering News reported on atomicvulnerability in the chemical process industry Nuclear weapons jetairplanes and the concept of total war combined wrote Neil P HurleySJ to blur the distinction between military force and industrial poten-tial The role of an industrymdashits functional interdependence on otherindustriesmdashxed the likelihood of its plants becoming targets Chemical-process industries were vulnerable on two fronts geographic concen-tration and functional criticality The conclusion was as inevitable asit was fearsome ldquoThree well-directed H-bombs on these key targetareas would have serious consequences for the industrial chemicalproducing complexrdquo28 Two-thirds of workers making industrial chem-icals lived in ten states

American chemical dispersion in 1955 was directly and explicitlylinked to German chemical dispersion in 1945 Over and over againHurley cited the Strategic Bombing Survey ldquoIt is worth noting thatantifriction bearings represented an Achilles heel in the German econ-omy in World War II The Strategic Bombing Survey indicated a paral-ysis of German industry following Allied air force bombings ofSchweinfurt where more than 50 of German antifriction bearingswere producedrdquo Four H-bombs for example could wipe out half the UScapacity to produce instruments and related products ldquoUnfortunatelythe US has many Schweinfurts In the Great Lakes region are to befound 47 of the nonelectrical machinery productionrdquo A saturationattack on that regionmdashand saturation would not take many bombsmdashwould Hurley noted destroy a vast array of industries including thatof chemicals29

Throughout the 1950s the Strategic Bombing Survey remained cen-tral to thinking about nuclear warfare and the dispersion of industryHurley for example in constructing his report on American chemicalpriorities reproduced the Surveyrsquos list of the ten most vital chemicalsfor the German war effort from nitrogen methanol and calcium car-bide down to caustic soda chlorine and sodium carbonate He reca-pitulated the Surveyrsquos conclusions about the shortages of nitric acid onthe manufacture of explosives the reduction of methanol that cut intothe making of high explosives and the Germansrsquo vain last-ditch effortsto create underground factories In this new narrative Americans

Galison | War against the Center 21

played the role previously performed by Germans Russians took overthe bombing role from the Allies Those who had used their knowledgeof American industry had planned the strategic bombing of the Axisnow they became the potential bombing victims readying plans to disperse Here is Hurley

To avoid a repetition in this country of the unfortunate experi-ences of the Germans during World War II necessary moves mustbe made before any outbreak of hostilities The Germans enjoyedthe luxury of learning from their mistakes It is highly doubtfulwhether in the atomic age any nation will have the same oppor-tunitymdashone mistake may well be the last30

Dispersal could aid in reconstruction and also preventionmdasha strongernation ldquoprotected in spacerdquo (as the phrase went) would deter any attacker

Admiral Ben Moreell retired from the Navy and in the mid-1950schairman of Jones amp Laughlin Steel Corporation had just presented tothe secretary of commerce the manifesto of the purposes of the Ironand Steel Advisory Council The council had urged a mobilization planfor steel in light of the threat presented by high-speed jet airplaneslong-range missiles and nuclear weapons that ldquoour prospectiveenemyrdquo might at any time hurl without warning Big steel needed acomplete control center one linked by telegraph and radio to the steel-making plants Admiral Moreell and his fellow advisers emphasizedthe proximate danger of Russians with H-bombs and in fact asMoreell noted they had one just a few days after his committee laid itsreport at Commerce Worriedly the admiral allowed that 75 percent ofAmerican steelmaking capacity could be destroyed by a mere tenhydrogen bombs The councilrsquos recommendation disperse 25 percentof the capacity in such a way that the resulting plants would be splitup into numerous single-function plants providing each plant with atleast three alternative modes for transporting its products It was timeMoreell intoned to take similar measures in a host of other industriesincluding rubber copper glass aluminum textiles automobiles andelectrical products Prepare for real costs for steel alone the disper-sion bill would run to some $10 billion

Moreell ldquoPerhaps I have overemphasized the hazard under whichwe now live I do not believe so The facts which are coming out withrespect to the tactics and policies of the Communist enemy in Chinaand Korea added to what we already know about them justify the con-clusion that we are facing a ruthless adversary who will permit nohumane consideration to inuence his decisions who will strike with-out prior warning and whose ambition is to rule the worldrdquo31

Dispersion might help the admiral concluded Like so much of this lit-

22 Grey Room 04

Opposite top Where the steelindustry is concentrated Source Admiral Ben MoreellldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do toUS Industriesrdquo US News andWorld Report 7 May 1954

Opposite bottom Destroyingsteel Source Moreell ldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do to USIndustriesrdquo

erature issues of protability and patriotism stood side by side and heconcluded under the ag gesturing to the Founding Father ldquoIn timeof peace prepare for warrdquo

Preparations advanced In 1956 Industrial Development a nationalmagazine dedicated to ldquoarea analysis and business site selectionrdquoreported that the Ofce of Area Development had reviewed and approvedsome fty-eight of the self-prepared urban area surveys Money talkedBy mid-June 1955 projects valued at $30 billion had qualied for taxabatements under the program

Take Milwaukee In December 1953 the cityrsquos mayor Frank Zeidlertraveled to the White House where the president addressed some twohundred large-city mayors in stark terms ldquoFor the rst time in historycities have become principal targets for an enemy seeking to conquerour nation The city has moved from a position of support in the rear Ithas moved out into the front linerdquo Immediately Zeidler arrangedto meet with the Wisconsin governor and the mayors of RacineMadison and Green Joining the chorus of civil defense authorities themayors agreed that in the short term they would need plans for rapidevacuation in the event of a nuclear attack at the same time theyneeded to begin longer-term planning for the dispersal of the city By

Galison | War against the Center 23

May 1954 Milwaukee had its report ldquoNew building in the core of anurban target [ought to] be prohibited except when it replaces existingstructures This is intended to halt the pouring of greater target valuesinto areas which are already richly rewarding as targetsrdquo Spreadingindustry wasnrsquot all that the report advocated The new region wouldneed new school districts novel tax structures and alternative typesof local governments Zoning would force dispersal from the centerinstitute bands of open space and deliver industrial plants to hinter-lands deliberately bypassed by major radial or circumferential roads inorder to avoid creating secondary concentrations ldquoThere is little doubtrdquothe reportrsquos author reckoned ldquothat some of [these] measures wouldhave to be fought through the Supreme Court before they were acceptedby allrdquo32 Pressed by national codes taxes defense spending andimprecations by the president on down local and federal authoritiescompeted to outdo the other in the rush away from the targeted center

America was not alone in declaring war on the urban center Canadain the midst of a major effort to plan urban growth in 1956 also begandefensive dispersal The Ofce of the Civil Defence Coordinator in col-laboration with the Defence Research Board and McGill Universityprepared a Guide to Urban Dispersal ldquoDispersal is the characteristicof present day urban growthrdquo the authors asserted Satellite towns andvillages made urban regions the right scale on which to re-think pat-terns of communication government and demography ldquoDefence iscritical In modern warfare the initial blow is struck at the civilian pop-ulation to destroy at a stroke the ability to resist The greatest vulnera-bility lies in urban concentrationmdashthe greatest security would beachieved by urban dispersalrdquo That dispersal would follow a survey ofa ring located an H-bomb radius away from the regional center That is

24 Grey Room 04

where the Guide came in Based in part on a real area and in part ongeneric characteristics the book was a how-to manual for planning thescattering of the urban into the regional Slope of the land location ofwater avenues of communication and transport needs all had to bereckoned The Guide instructed local leaders and planners how to dia-gram all this for their future Satellite towns would perch outside thering of safetymdashtowns that under no circumstances ought to attractmore than forty thousand inhabitants Ultimately government-pro-pelled ldquourban regionsrdquo would replace the ldquoamorphous formrdquo of currentmetropolitan development alleviating social and economic problemswhile securing spatial defense against thermonuclear attack33 City bycity country by country the bomb helped drive dispersion Indeedcoming full circle the Germans already all too familiar with aerialbombardment began preparing for a rain of hydrogen bombsHannover Bremen and Duumlsseldorf issued the rst three analyses andothers would follow Their comprehensive treatments covered the sta-tus of police re hospital postal service and road service followinga nuclear attack34

Preparation for atomic war was certainly on President Dwight DEisenhowerrsquos mind as he strove to resuscitate the long-debated federalhighway system Franklin D Roosevelt had pushed the idea in the1930s not least for its promise of providing jobs Reports rolled in TheBureau of Public Roads undertook one in 1938 and the chairman ofthat organization presided over another called Interregional Highwaysdated 1943 Other reports and standards marched on through the warwith some actually leading to road buildingmdashin 1947 crews began cut-ting the rst miles of interstate highways Still by the time Eisenhowercame into office in January 1953 there were but six thousand or somiles of road improvements actually on the ground (at a cost of nearly$1 billion)

Eisenhower liked highways He had struggled across the country ina motorized convoy back in 1919 an unpleasant sixty-two days of slip-ping on ice sticking in mud breaking into wooden bridges and freez-ing under snow The contrast with Germany was stark As SupremeCommander General Eisenhower had been astonished by the auto-bahns taking particular note of the advantages that road system affordedas he had to move masses of men and mateacuteriel across the conqueredReich ldquoGermany made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons acrossthe landrdquo On July 12 1954 Vice President Richard Nixon facing theconference of state governors at Lake George New York read fromEisenhowerrsquos prepared speech and the message was clear The obso-lete network had to go its antiquated byways were clogging the roadsand courts while leaving a death toll on the citizenry comparable to

Galison | War against the Center 25

Industrial dispersal 1956 Solidcircles show cities where dispersalplans were approved by late 1955dotted circles indicate communi-ties where plans were under prepa-ration Source Theodore K PasmaldquoIndustrial Dispersal 1956rdquo Indus-trial Development The NationalMagazine of Area Analysis andBusiness Site Selection (January-February 1956)

ldquoa bloody warrdquo But Eisenhowerrsquos final jab at the current system wasstark holding up for public contemplation its ldquoappalling inadequaciesto meet the demands of catastrophe or defense should an atomic warcomerdquo35 Radial roads would afford clear routes for city evacuationCircumferential roads Project East River had recommended back in1952 should be encouraged wherever possible to drain industry andpopulation from the dense city centers36 In fact highway designersconsulted with federal civil defense agencies and military plannersaimed for interstate highways that would bypass urban areas to avoidldquoroute[s] that had suffered a direct A-bomb hitrdquo37 It took two years ofpolitical wrangling and it goes without saying that economic housingand non-nuclear forces for the interstate were surely among its powerfulmotors By the end of 1956 the Interstate and Defense Highway Systemhad fundingmdashsome $25 billion of federal support38

3 Distributed KnowledgeBy 1960 the Air Force began dreaming worse nightmares than nuke-ladenbombers bullying their way past ghter defense Atomic strikes againstthe continental United States could be launched with missiles forwhich range of ight was no longer an issue The RAND Corporationmade its mark with contracts to think about this thermonuclear threatfrom the new think tank issued shelves of studies including thefamous (and famously parodied) volume by Herman Kahn On Thermo-nuclear War Just as Kahn stepped into the limelight the much lesswell known Paul Baran an electrical engineer coming from HughesAircraft Companyrsquos systems group joined RAND His job was todevelop a scheme that would ensure the survival of the US telecom-munications infrastructure through a Russian rst strikemdasha vital linknot only for domestic communication but also for command and con-trol His response in a series of papers launched in 1960 was a plan toremove completely critical nodes from the telephone system Like thethree highways many wanted from each dispersed defense plantBaranrsquos vision aimed for safety in redundantly connected spatially dis-tributed mini-centers

Here is how Baran put it in one of his rst papers

The cloud-of-doom attitude that nuclear war spells the end of theearth is slowly lifting from the minds of the many Better quanti-tative estimates of post-attack destruction together with a lessemotional discussion of the alternatives may mark the end of theldquowhat the hellmdashwhatrsquos the userdquo era A new view emerges the pos-sibility of a war exists but there is much that can be done to min-imize the consequences

26 Grey Room 04

De nition of redundancy Paul Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunications I Introductionto Distributed CommunicationsNetworkrdquo RAND Corporationmemorandum RM-3420-PRAugust 1964

Survivable atomic warmdashthe goal of the fteen-year struggle since theSurvey crew picked through the still radioactive rubble at HiroshimaBaran again

If war does not mean the end of the earth in a black and whitemanner then it follows that we should do those things that makethe shade of gray as light as possible to plan now to minimizepotential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permitthe survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstructthe economy swiftly39

That reconstruction demanded the elimination of the hierarchical center alternately referred to over these rst decades of the cold war asthe linchpin the bottleneck and the node

The problem as Baran formulated it did involve new equipment tolabel digitally each packet of information with a ldquotordquo and ldquofromrdquo andthen to route these fragments over diverse paths toward their eventualreassembly on arrival But before anything could be built moved dig-itized or reinforced the conceptual problem required attention Thatreconceptualization now took as it had not before a mathematicalform If nodes were replaced with redundant links how could heexploit the information-theoretic approach of Claude Shannon to countthe surviving paths between points in the array

Here is how Baran reasoned

Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network whichwill allow several hundred major communications stations to talkwith one another after an enemy attack As a criterion of surviv-ability we elect to use the percentage of stations both survivingthe physical attack and remaining in electrical connection withthe largest single group of surviving stations This criterion ischosen as a conservative measure of the ability of the survivingstations to operate together as a coherent entity after the attack40

With the result that a redundancy of at least R = 3would ensure a likely survival rate of nearly 75 percentBaran could now sketch the distributed system thatwould vouchsafe communication after nuclear war

Worst obviously was the centralized node that rep-resented the single critical target This was the situationwith concentrated steel electricity or oil plants it wasthe structure of the hubbed railway system It was inshort the bombing plannerrsquos dream and the bombingvictimrsquos nightmare Decentralized nodes that main-tained a local hierarchical structure were clearly better

Galison | War against the Center 27

a complete grid structure was best of all To a certain extent such gridsstood for the defensive ideal of dispersion more generally By increasingthe number of targets one decreased the likelihood of incapacitationHalting abortive and awkward though it was Baranrsquos scheme (alongwith a similar one developed in England) slowly wended its way throughdifferent incarnations in the ARPANET and Milnet But the elusivegoal all through these decades of distributed communication was a dis-tributed grid or mesh a thrust in the rst instance aimed at removingthe critical node Though in the garb of nuclear survivability the gridmay not appear as the redemptive Internet of our dreams that tech-nology grew directly out of fifteen years of longing for a world stillstanding after thermonuclear war41

4 We Are Become TargetsDuring the years of World War II American and British planners andanalysts learned to see through a bombsight Not in a single glimpsebut in the routine killings and losses that accompanied ever more fre-quently repeated raids Twenty-four hours a day day after day monthafter month year after year the planners and analysts studied andrestudied the interdependencies of the German economy circled tar-gets blasted factories leveled cities analyzed the damage and struckagain Chemicals nitric acid methanol Basic materials rubber steeloil aviation gas Transport systems electrical generators And popula-tion centers area bombing by the combined American and Britishforces killed some 600000 Germans In a war that the Nazis renderedever more vicious even as their defeat seemed inevitable the Americansrsquoearly dreams of precision bombing went by the way Two hundredplanes over Schweinfurt then four hundred but also Hamburg LuumlbeckMuumlnster Berlin Dresden Regensburg year after year Measuring bombloads accuracies reconstruction time 35 ton of bombs per acre toinduce damage of 8 percent delay time for reconstruction two and a

28 Grey Room 04

half months A calculus of fractions probabilities delaysBy the warrsquos end a new category of analyst had come into existence

more often than not social scientists and industrialists but also human-ists diplomats mathematicians and natural scientists Piecing togetherfragments of intelligence examining reconnaissance photographs theypainted an elaborate portrait of a wartime foe By warrsquos end the Surveyanalysts had come to see German and Japanese cities through what onemight call a ldquodestructive functionalismrdquo dependencies leading back-ward they kept hoping to the ever-elusive linchpin that when pulledwould topple the structure Schweinfurt was supposed to be one suchpoint with its all-important bearing factories And after Schweinfurtthere were other ldquobottlenecksrdquo to be targeted other cities other plantsother transshipment points

Perhaps before Hiroshima the bombsight eye had already begun toreect back I donrsquot know But in the atomic rubble as the analysts inter-viewed hundreds of blast survivors and canvassed the broken struc-tures as they methodically noted which kinds of concrete walls stillstood at various radii of destruction they began quite explicitly to seethemselves to see America through the bombardierrsquos eye They beganto wonder what an American city would look like after the bomb hadfallen Returning to the United States and publishing their StrategicBombing Survey things began to look different They began to see them-selves their towns and factories on the crosshairs of radial targetingmaps Far from a technological determinism the all-too material tech-nologies and concepts of self were fully imbricated

One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics launched when NorbertWiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedbackmachine that could be mimicked electronically from there it was a shortstep to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way Then humanphysiology began to appear as a cybernetic system then the humanmind then life then even the world system as a whole42 Somewherein the midst of total war a technocratic vision of a technical EnemyOther rose to become a vision of ourselves It was but a heartbeat beforecybernetics saturated the writings of Gregory Bateson and MargaretMead not to speak of philosophers planners and architects

But the consequence was this Three years before the Russians hadthe bomb in fact before on just about anyonersquos account the cold warhad begun American analysts were already advocating a massive dis-persion of factories and populations against atomic aerial attack

As the cold war arms race accelerated the search for ldquodefense in spacerdquogrew more desperate jet bombers atomic bombs hydrogen bombsintercontinental ballistic missiles With each step more frantic urgingto spread the cities into their ldquomarketing areasrdquo Highway systems

Galison | War against the Center 29

Centralized decentralized and distributed networksSource Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

effects of the blast separately and methodically outlining its effect onbuildings and bodies by pressure heat and radiation Taking the testi-mony of hundreds of survivors the analysts asked about morale inquiredabout feelings of rebellion toward the government about attitudestoward the United States The bomb surveyors even if briey exploredthe effect of the nuclear devastation on internal high-level Japanesedeliberations about the future of the war

Suddenly in the concluding section of the report the authors took adifferent tack and the tone changed Gone was the absolute distancethe surveyors had managed to maintain toward industrial targets citiesand military objectives All at once the weapons dropped on an enemyjust months before began to appear in an inverted vision in which thosesame weapons appeared turned against the United States

The Surveyrsquos investigators as they proceeded about their studyfound an insistent question framing itself in their minds ldquoWhat ifthe target for the bomb had been an American cityrdquo True the pri-mary mission of the Survey was to ascertain the facts just sum-marized But conclusions as to the meaning of those facts forcitizens of the United States forced themselves almost inescapablyon the men who examined thoughtfully the remains of Hiroshimaand Nagasaki17

Sifting the rubble interviewing the wounded survivors the BombingSurvey investigators began to see similarities between Japanese build-ings and American ones between surviving structures at Hiroshimaand possible shelters in the United States They made it clear in printthat they thought the two nuclear-devastated sites were the best argu-ment against war itself but they also began to speculate on howAmericans might survive the kinds of attacks they themselves had justvisited on the Japanese

The fate of industries in both cities again illustrates the value ofdecentralization All major factories in Hiroshima were on theperiphery of the citymdashand escaped serious damage at Nagasakiplants and dockyards at the southern end of the city were merelyintact but those in the valley where the bomb exploded wereseriously damaged18

Medical facilities typically located in the central parts of the cities lay in smoldering ruins So it had been in Hamburg where survivors of theraids had lain in shock without assistance in their hours of greatest need

Looking at Hiroshima Nagasaki and Hamburg Survey personnelbegan to see their own large cities Already in 1946 they pressed for adramatic shift in the way those cities were conceived

Galison | War against the Center 13

The similar peril of American cities and the extent to which wisezoning has diminished it differ from city to city Though a reshap-ing and partial dispersal of the national centers of activity aredrastic and difcult measures they represent a social and mili-tary ideal toward which very practical steps can be taken once thepolicy has been laid down19

Efforts toward decentralization remained desultory during 1947But already Congress had ordered the National Security ResourcesBoard to begin exploring industrial relocation Abruptly in the sum-mer of 1949 the laissez-faire mood ended For it was in August that theRussians detonated their rst atomic bomb named by the West Joe 1Despite nearly four years of warning that the Russians would probablyhave nuclear weapons within five years of the Trinity test Americanpolicy experts politicians military officers and atomic scientistsreacted with an alarm bordering on panic Called to offer a response tothe Russian bomb in October 1949 the General Advisory Committee(GAC) under J Robert Oppenheimer convened only to harden theirresistance to further escalation of the arms race In a surprising andunanimous vote the GAC recommended against building the hydrogenbomb on moral grounds A weapon of genocide they asserted an ldquoevilunder lightrdquo It was that anti-H-bomb decision soon ratied by the AtomicEnergy Commissioners that sent a ssure straight down the center of acommunity of scientists grown close-knit during the war

The GACrsquos H-bomb report catalyzed a swift hard struggle betweenopponents and proponents of this new category of weapon Lobbyingbegan in secretmdashand then burst into the public arena after a congressionalleak Editorials in newspapers magazines and television erupted onboth sides with debate continuing all the way up to President Harry S Trumanrsquos decision in January 1950 The country would in fact buildthe hydrogen bomb In June 1950 the Korean War beganmdashmobilizationindustrial and military heightened as never before and the govern-ment inaugurated a still-continuing national commitment to a hugemilitary establishment

It was in this context that in August 1951 the president announceda national policy for industrial dispersion and the National SecurityResources Board quickly followed with a booklet entitled Is Your Planta Target that proclaimed ldquoThe risk of an all-out atomic attack on theUnited States grows greater each day since we are no longer the solepossessor of the secret of the atomic bomb This means that no indus-trial area in the Nation can be considered safe from attackrdquo20 To guar-antee survival the National Security Resources Board insisted wouldrequire that productive capacity be protected ldquoThe dispersion (or

14 Grey Room 04

Site selection for securitySource Industrial DispersionNational Security ResourcesBoard Is Your Plant a Target(Washington DC US Govern-ment Printing Of ce 1951)

deployment in space) of new plant development for war-supportingindustries can make American production less vulnerable to attackrdquoSpace could protect men at the battleeld the authors continued andspace by multiplying targets would diminish ldquothe vulnerability of anyone concentrationrdquo

Behind this national program lay four principles First the disper-sion would be of new industries rather than old second ldquono region ofthe country is to be built up at the expense of anotherrdquo third the dis-persion would take place within so-called ldquomarketing areasrdquo and fourthstate and local governments with private industry would initiate thechange and the federal government would encourage and providetechnical guidance

To tempt industrialists the Feds advertised additional benets thatwould accrue to those industries that dispersed better working andliving conditions for workers greater production by avoiding urbancongestion a healthier more stable economy Adding further quitematerial sweeteners to the mix the federal government promised toallocate ldquocerticates of necessityrdquo critical materials emergency loansand defense contracts to those industries that escaped the connes ofurban concentration Reading the booklet the industrialist and thecivic leader could begin asking themselves these questions

The handy cow pasture on the edge of town may look like a goodsite but does it measure up to the all-important security stan-dards Is it strategically located in relation to labor supply fueltransportation and other requirements for efcient and econom-

Galison | War against the Center 15

ical production Is the site properly located in relation to futurehomes shops schools and other community developments Hasfull consideration been given to efcient wartime productionand long-term benets to industry and community When youhave answered these questions you are on the way to developinga sound industrial dispersion program21

Industrialists swarmed toward Washington to assess the new plansGathered under the auspices of the Executive Ofce of the President

the National Security Resources Board assembled the key players on 7September 1951 in the Executive Ofce Building in Washington DC

Jack Small chairman of the Munitions Board told the assembledthat he was more scared now than when he came down to Washingtonsome nine months earlier

In the intervening time that God has given us we have madeprogress in the production of weapons getting new weaponsmade and creating a force strength but we are not yet ready andwe are in really desperate danger in the event that our enemyattacks For Godrsquos sake donrsquot get the idea that this thing isover or that the danger has nished or that these fanatic enemiesof ours have changed their plans or objectives one iota Theyhave not We will have achieved by next year a posture ofmore strength but still it will not be enough strength to pre-vent aggression

The ldquoall-outrdquo could come at any moment Small insisted to the indus-trialists and it could come by intention or by accident There was onlyone hope ldquoSpace is the one thing that really worksrdquo22

Soon however the discussion turned away from plutonium andtoward prots How queried the representatives from Alabama andLouisiana might this dispersion bring industry to their areas and awayfrom the Northeast which already had such access to the federal silverspoon Industrialists wondered aloud how much federal force-feedingthere would be and the ofcials reassured them that they intended inno way to damage business interests lower productivity or threaten a lossof labor supply This was to be dispersion within a marketing areamdashnot wholesale relocation to distant states

Small and his colleagues in dispersion left the audience withsomewhat vague injunctions But the national policy did vastly moreit aimed to make citizens of every community into target analysts oftheir own region As the Bureau of Commerce patiently explainedldquomaterials and methods for identifying the potential target areas aredescribed on the following pagesrdquo23 Those ldquopotential target areasrdquo

16 Grey Room 04

were the cities and towns of the United States Here is how the Commerce Department directed every community

but especially the top 168 metropolitan areas to proceed First checkthe list of industrial classifications and identify all those plantsemploying more than one hundred workers per peak shift These ranfrom industrial inorganic chemicals coke and byproducts to steelmills engines aircraft scientific instruments photographic equip-ment and ordnance Then identify those locations on a map (naturallynot disclosing the precise role of any single plant to unwanted eyes)Combine this information with outlines of heavily populated sectionsfollowing the information of the Census Bureau Lay out two largemaps (one inch equals one mile) showing political subdivisions arterialhighways railroads ports and harbors alongside industrial areas Nextdraw a series of four-inch (four-mile) circles on transparent overlaysmdashthese correspond to the area destroyed by an atomic bomb

Now you are ready to identify your regionrsquos target zones ldquothose areasthat contain sufcient concentrations of industry or population so asto constitute attractive atom-bomb targetsrdquo24 Just ldquoattractive atom-bombtargetsrdquo not sites ldquolikely to be targeted by the Russiansrdquomdashthe reifiedshorthand compresses all those years of wartime and then postwar tar-geting Your goal in what follows is to use these circles to form a targetout of the city as a whole by transecting the four-mile-diameter circlesonce they are judiciously located In particular the full target will contain both valuable defense-related industries (employing 16000workers in toto) or a residential population of 200000 people

Here is the schematic procedureThis region outlined by the dark line encloses the ldquohighly indus-

trialized sectionrdquo as defined by the National Industrial DispersionProgram Next each community is to plot the census tracts on the sec-ond set of working maps At the center of each tract goes a dot and thepopulation Again you overlay a four-mile transparent circle movingit until it circles a population of 200000 When you connect the centersof these 200000-person circles you have formed a ldquodensely populatedsectionrdquo Next join the two maps in such a way as to form a combinedarea embracing the high density of regions of both industry and popu-lation This joint region the Commerce Department declared wouldbe known as a potential A-bomb target zone From that zone measureten inches (ten miles) out to form the dispersal limit line There is yourgoal Locate all future critical industry and its associated populationspast the line of safety taking care not to create inadvertently a secondarypotential A-bomb target zone

These maps were not designed just to scare they would form witha factory proposal an application for a ldquocerticate of necessityrdquo (granting

Galison | War against the Center 17

18 Grey Room 04

Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo

Boundary of highly industrial ized section

Census-tract population centers with population gures

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of highly industrialized section

Galison | War against the Center 19

Top row left to right Self-targeting step I Take the listof government designated defense-related industries and plot theirlocation and employment This isthe rst task towards the construc-tion of areas known as the highlyindustrialized sections Source USDepartment of Commerce Indus-trial Dispersion Guidebook forCommunities Domestic CommerceSeries no 31 (Washington DCUS Government Printing Of ce1952)

Self-targeting step II To completethe construction of the perimeterof the highly industrialized sectionsdraw circles of four-mile radiusconnect centers of circles contain-ing more than 16000 workersSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step III Label populations from census tractsSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Bottom row left to right Self-targeting step IV To completethe construction of the denselypopulated sections draw circles offour-mile radius and connect thecenters of circles with more than200000 inhabitants SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Self-targeting step V Now super-impose the highly industrializedarea on the densely populatedarea Taken together they form the potential A-bomb Target zoneSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step VI Drawingthe potential A-bomb target zoneon a regional map planners shouldnow construct a safety margin often miles from the outside of theendangered area All new industrialplants should be dispersed out-side this ten-mile radius SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Census-tract population centers with population gures

accelerated tax amortization) facilitating the approval of defense loansand securing defense contracts

Bombing the Axis economy and dispersing the American one werereflections of one another When Charles E Wilson director of theOffice of Defense Mobilization came before the National SecurityResources Board of the Presidentrsquos Executive Office he needed anexpert on how to disperse industry To the captains of industry assem-bled for a 1951 hearing Wilson sought to justify his strictures aboutsplitting plants by ten or twenty miles ldquoMr Gorrie brought me a realexpert on that I call him a real expert because he was one of the menwho had done bombing in the industrial arena of Germany and cer-tainly he convinced me that 10 or 20 miles provides reasonable safetyrdquo25

Bombers braced for bombsIn 1952 Project East River (Associated Universities contracted to the

federal government) reported on how Washington could drive indus-try outside the expanding urban areas ldquoleapfroggingrdquo away from urbancores One role was to create ldquopublic understandingrdquo of the need forldquosatellite townrdquo planning and its defense use More materially theEast River gang reported the federal government should provide aidto assist in the construction of urban arteries to the satellite towns pro-vide rent subsidies to small businesses send appropriations to matchmetropolitan planning units offer tax assistance for new constructionin outlying areas demand dispersal to qualify for federal defenseinsurance and promote federal loans and grants for the constructionof outlying schools streets water and sewers The government shouldsubsidize ring roads around citiesmdashlike Route 128 around Bostonmdashand strive to locate defense industry on it Above all the fast-increas-ing population ofce building and industry heading into cities had tobe reversed Throughout constant vigilance against the re-creation ofnew centers26

Eponymously the report took as its ldquoarea studyrdquo the imagined caseof a Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapon detonated several thousand feetabove a 260-acre rectangle in Manhattan adjacent to the East RiverWith detailed information about the age structure and flammabilityof individual buildingsmdashand recent census datamdashthis not-so-typicalpiece of America could then be tracked as it shattered and burnedunder the assault of nuclear attack How many of the 35000 peopleresiding between 59th and 72nd Streets (between 3rd Avenue and theriver) would become casualties if a weapon were to be exploded at 2 AM How many minutesrsquo warning would they have to take shelterHow much radiation would they receive Would a firestorm eruptBased principally on the results of the US Strategic Bombing Surveyon Hiroshima and Nagasaki this report was in a sense a dully terrifying

20 Grey Room 04

answer to the question the Bombing Survey had posed seven years earlier What would the bombs that were let loose over Hiroshima havelooked like were they to have been dropped back home27

Under the guidance of these various boards and the lucrative drawof taxes loans and contracts one by one key industrial and civic leaderslearned to see themselves through the reflection of a bombsight Oneby one they began plotting their own dispersion In September 1955for example the Chemical and Engineering News reported on atomicvulnerability in the chemical process industry Nuclear weapons jetairplanes and the concept of total war combined wrote Neil P HurleySJ to blur the distinction between military force and industrial poten-tial The role of an industrymdashits functional interdependence on otherindustriesmdashxed the likelihood of its plants becoming targets Chemical-process industries were vulnerable on two fronts geographic concen-tration and functional criticality The conclusion was as inevitable asit was fearsome ldquoThree well-directed H-bombs on these key targetareas would have serious consequences for the industrial chemicalproducing complexrdquo28 Two-thirds of workers making industrial chem-icals lived in ten states

American chemical dispersion in 1955 was directly and explicitlylinked to German chemical dispersion in 1945 Over and over againHurley cited the Strategic Bombing Survey ldquoIt is worth noting thatantifriction bearings represented an Achilles heel in the German econ-omy in World War II The Strategic Bombing Survey indicated a paral-ysis of German industry following Allied air force bombings ofSchweinfurt where more than 50 of German antifriction bearingswere producedrdquo Four H-bombs for example could wipe out half the UScapacity to produce instruments and related products ldquoUnfortunatelythe US has many Schweinfurts In the Great Lakes region are to befound 47 of the nonelectrical machinery productionrdquo A saturationattack on that regionmdashand saturation would not take many bombsmdashwould Hurley noted destroy a vast array of industries including thatof chemicals29

Throughout the 1950s the Strategic Bombing Survey remained cen-tral to thinking about nuclear warfare and the dispersion of industryHurley for example in constructing his report on American chemicalpriorities reproduced the Surveyrsquos list of the ten most vital chemicalsfor the German war effort from nitrogen methanol and calcium car-bide down to caustic soda chlorine and sodium carbonate He reca-pitulated the Surveyrsquos conclusions about the shortages of nitric acid onthe manufacture of explosives the reduction of methanol that cut intothe making of high explosives and the Germansrsquo vain last-ditch effortsto create underground factories In this new narrative Americans

Galison | War against the Center 21

played the role previously performed by Germans Russians took overthe bombing role from the Allies Those who had used their knowledgeof American industry had planned the strategic bombing of the Axisnow they became the potential bombing victims readying plans to disperse Here is Hurley

To avoid a repetition in this country of the unfortunate experi-ences of the Germans during World War II necessary moves mustbe made before any outbreak of hostilities The Germans enjoyedthe luxury of learning from their mistakes It is highly doubtfulwhether in the atomic age any nation will have the same oppor-tunitymdashone mistake may well be the last30

Dispersal could aid in reconstruction and also preventionmdasha strongernation ldquoprotected in spacerdquo (as the phrase went) would deter any attacker

Admiral Ben Moreell retired from the Navy and in the mid-1950schairman of Jones amp Laughlin Steel Corporation had just presented tothe secretary of commerce the manifesto of the purposes of the Ironand Steel Advisory Council The council had urged a mobilization planfor steel in light of the threat presented by high-speed jet airplaneslong-range missiles and nuclear weapons that ldquoour prospectiveenemyrdquo might at any time hurl without warning Big steel needed acomplete control center one linked by telegraph and radio to the steel-making plants Admiral Moreell and his fellow advisers emphasizedthe proximate danger of Russians with H-bombs and in fact asMoreell noted they had one just a few days after his committee laid itsreport at Commerce Worriedly the admiral allowed that 75 percent ofAmerican steelmaking capacity could be destroyed by a mere tenhydrogen bombs The councilrsquos recommendation disperse 25 percentof the capacity in such a way that the resulting plants would be splitup into numerous single-function plants providing each plant with atleast three alternative modes for transporting its products It was timeMoreell intoned to take similar measures in a host of other industriesincluding rubber copper glass aluminum textiles automobiles andelectrical products Prepare for real costs for steel alone the disper-sion bill would run to some $10 billion

Moreell ldquoPerhaps I have overemphasized the hazard under whichwe now live I do not believe so The facts which are coming out withrespect to the tactics and policies of the Communist enemy in Chinaand Korea added to what we already know about them justify the con-clusion that we are facing a ruthless adversary who will permit nohumane consideration to inuence his decisions who will strike with-out prior warning and whose ambition is to rule the worldrdquo31

Dispersion might help the admiral concluded Like so much of this lit-

22 Grey Room 04

Opposite top Where the steelindustry is concentrated Source Admiral Ben MoreellldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do toUS Industriesrdquo US News andWorld Report 7 May 1954

Opposite bottom Destroyingsteel Source Moreell ldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do to USIndustriesrdquo

erature issues of protability and patriotism stood side by side and heconcluded under the ag gesturing to the Founding Father ldquoIn timeof peace prepare for warrdquo

Preparations advanced In 1956 Industrial Development a nationalmagazine dedicated to ldquoarea analysis and business site selectionrdquoreported that the Ofce of Area Development had reviewed and approvedsome fty-eight of the self-prepared urban area surveys Money talkedBy mid-June 1955 projects valued at $30 billion had qualied for taxabatements under the program

Take Milwaukee In December 1953 the cityrsquos mayor Frank Zeidlertraveled to the White House where the president addressed some twohundred large-city mayors in stark terms ldquoFor the rst time in historycities have become principal targets for an enemy seeking to conquerour nation The city has moved from a position of support in the rear Ithas moved out into the front linerdquo Immediately Zeidler arrangedto meet with the Wisconsin governor and the mayors of RacineMadison and Green Joining the chorus of civil defense authorities themayors agreed that in the short term they would need plans for rapidevacuation in the event of a nuclear attack at the same time theyneeded to begin longer-term planning for the dispersal of the city By

Galison | War against the Center 23

May 1954 Milwaukee had its report ldquoNew building in the core of anurban target [ought to] be prohibited except when it replaces existingstructures This is intended to halt the pouring of greater target valuesinto areas which are already richly rewarding as targetsrdquo Spreadingindustry wasnrsquot all that the report advocated The new region wouldneed new school districts novel tax structures and alternative typesof local governments Zoning would force dispersal from the centerinstitute bands of open space and deliver industrial plants to hinter-lands deliberately bypassed by major radial or circumferential roads inorder to avoid creating secondary concentrations ldquoThere is little doubtrdquothe reportrsquos author reckoned ldquothat some of [these] measures wouldhave to be fought through the Supreme Court before they were acceptedby allrdquo32 Pressed by national codes taxes defense spending andimprecations by the president on down local and federal authoritiescompeted to outdo the other in the rush away from the targeted center

America was not alone in declaring war on the urban center Canadain the midst of a major effort to plan urban growth in 1956 also begandefensive dispersal The Ofce of the Civil Defence Coordinator in col-laboration with the Defence Research Board and McGill Universityprepared a Guide to Urban Dispersal ldquoDispersal is the characteristicof present day urban growthrdquo the authors asserted Satellite towns andvillages made urban regions the right scale on which to re-think pat-terns of communication government and demography ldquoDefence iscritical In modern warfare the initial blow is struck at the civilian pop-ulation to destroy at a stroke the ability to resist The greatest vulnera-bility lies in urban concentrationmdashthe greatest security would beachieved by urban dispersalrdquo That dispersal would follow a survey ofa ring located an H-bomb radius away from the regional center That is

24 Grey Room 04

where the Guide came in Based in part on a real area and in part ongeneric characteristics the book was a how-to manual for planning thescattering of the urban into the regional Slope of the land location ofwater avenues of communication and transport needs all had to bereckoned The Guide instructed local leaders and planners how to dia-gram all this for their future Satellite towns would perch outside thering of safetymdashtowns that under no circumstances ought to attractmore than forty thousand inhabitants Ultimately government-pro-pelled ldquourban regionsrdquo would replace the ldquoamorphous formrdquo of currentmetropolitan development alleviating social and economic problemswhile securing spatial defense against thermonuclear attack33 City bycity country by country the bomb helped drive dispersion Indeedcoming full circle the Germans already all too familiar with aerialbombardment began preparing for a rain of hydrogen bombsHannover Bremen and Duumlsseldorf issued the rst three analyses andothers would follow Their comprehensive treatments covered the sta-tus of police re hospital postal service and road service followinga nuclear attack34

Preparation for atomic war was certainly on President Dwight DEisenhowerrsquos mind as he strove to resuscitate the long-debated federalhighway system Franklin D Roosevelt had pushed the idea in the1930s not least for its promise of providing jobs Reports rolled in TheBureau of Public Roads undertook one in 1938 and the chairman ofthat organization presided over another called Interregional Highwaysdated 1943 Other reports and standards marched on through the warwith some actually leading to road buildingmdashin 1947 crews began cut-ting the rst miles of interstate highways Still by the time Eisenhowercame into office in January 1953 there were but six thousand or somiles of road improvements actually on the ground (at a cost of nearly$1 billion)

Eisenhower liked highways He had struggled across the country ina motorized convoy back in 1919 an unpleasant sixty-two days of slip-ping on ice sticking in mud breaking into wooden bridges and freez-ing under snow The contrast with Germany was stark As SupremeCommander General Eisenhower had been astonished by the auto-bahns taking particular note of the advantages that road system affordedas he had to move masses of men and mateacuteriel across the conqueredReich ldquoGermany made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons acrossthe landrdquo On July 12 1954 Vice President Richard Nixon facing theconference of state governors at Lake George New York read fromEisenhowerrsquos prepared speech and the message was clear The obso-lete network had to go its antiquated byways were clogging the roadsand courts while leaving a death toll on the citizenry comparable to

Galison | War against the Center 25

Industrial dispersal 1956 Solidcircles show cities where dispersalplans were approved by late 1955dotted circles indicate communi-ties where plans were under prepa-ration Source Theodore K PasmaldquoIndustrial Dispersal 1956rdquo Indus-trial Development The NationalMagazine of Area Analysis andBusiness Site Selection (January-February 1956)

ldquoa bloody warrdquo But Eisenhowerrsquos final jab at the current system wasstark holding up for public contemplation its ldquoappalling inadequaciesto meet the demands of catastrophe or defense should an atomic warcomerdquo35 Radial roads would afford clear routes for city evacuationCircumferential roads Project East River had recommended back in1952 should be encouraged wherever possible to drain industry andpopulation from the dense city centers36 In fact highway designersconsulted with federal civil defense agencies and military plannersaimed for interstate highways that would bypass urban areas to avoidldquoroute[s] that had suffered a direct A-bomb hitrdquo37 It took two years ofpolitical wrangling and it goes without saying that economic housingand non-nuclear forces for the interstate were surely among its powerfulmotors By the end of 1956 the Interstate and Defense Highway Systemhad fundingmdashsome $25 billion of federal support38

3 Distributed KnowledgeBy 1960 the Air Force began dreaming worse nightmares than nuke-ladenbombers bullying their way past ghter defense Atomic strikes againstthe continental United States could be launched with missiles forwhich range of ight was no longer an issue The RAND Corporationmade its mark with contracts to think about this thermonuclear threatfrom the new think tank issued shelves of studies including thefamous (and famously parodied) volume by Herman Kahn On Thermo-nuclear War Just as Kahn stepped into the limelight the much lesswell known Paul Baran an electrical engineer coming from HughesAircraft Companyrsquos systems group joined RAND His job was todevelop a scheme that would ensure the survival of the US telecom-munications infrastructure through a Russian rst strikemdasha vital linknot only for domestic communication but also for command and con-trol His response in a series of papers launched in 1960 was a plan toremove completely critical nodes from the telephone system Like thethree highways many wanted from each dispersed defense plantBaranrsquos vision aimed for safety in redundantly connected spatially dis-tributed mini-centers

Here is how Baran put it in one of his rst papers

The cloud-of-doom attitude that nuclear war spells the end of theearth is slowly lifting from the minds of the many Better quanti-tative estimates of post-attack destruction together with a lessemotional discussion of the alternatives may mark the end of theldquowhat the hellmdashwhatrsquos the userdquo era A new view emerges the pos-sibility of a war exists but there is much that can be done to min-imize the consequences

26 Grey Room 04

De nition of redundancy Paul Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunications I Introductionto Distributed CommunicationsNetworkrdquo RAND Corporationmemorandum RM-3420-PRAugust 1964

Survivable atomic warmdashthe goal of the fteen-year struggle since theSurvey crew picked through the still radioactive rubble at HiroshimaBaran again

If war does not mean the end of the earth in a black and whitemanner then it follows that we should do those things that makethe shade of gray as light as possible to plan now to minimizepotential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permitthe survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstructthe economy swiftly39

That reconstruction demanded the elimination of the hierarchical center alternately referred to over these rst decades of the cold war asthe linchpin the bottleneck and the node

The problem as Baran formulated it did involve new equipment tolabel digitally each packet of information with a ldquotordquo and ldquofromrdquo andthen to route these fragments over diverse paths toward their eventualreassembly on arrival But before anything could be built moved dig-itized or reinforced the conceptual problem required attention Thatreconceptualization now took as it had not before a mathematicalform If nodes were replaced with redundant links how could heexploit the information-theoretic approach of Claude Shannon to countthe surviving paths between points in the array

Here is how Baran reasoned

Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network whichwill allow several hundred major communications stations to talkwith one another after an enemy attack As a criterion of surviv-ability we elect to use the percentage of stations both survivingthe physical attack and remaining in electrical connection withthe largest single group of surviving stations This criterion ischosen as a conservative measure of the ability of the survivingstations to operate together as a coherent entity after the attack40

With the result that a redundancy of at least R = 3would ensure a likely survival rate of nearly 75 percentBaran could now sketch the distributed system thatwould vouchsafe communication after nuclear war

Worst obviously was the centralized node that rep-resented the single critical target This was the situationwith concentrated steel electricity or oil plants it wasthe structure of the hubbed railway system It was inshort the bombing plannerrsquos dream and the bombingvictimrsquos nightmare Decentralized nodes that main-tained a local hierarchical structure were clearly better

Galison | War against the Center 27

a complete grid structure was best of all To a certain extent such gridsstood for the defensive ideal of dispersion more generally By increasingthe number of targets one decreased the likelihood of incapacitationHalting abortive and awkward though it was Baranrsquos scheme (alongwith a similar one developed in England) slowly wended its way throughdifferent incarnations in the ARPANET and Milnet But the elusivegoal all through these decades of distributed communication was a dis-tributed grid or mesh a thrust in the rst instance aimed at removingthe critical node Though in the garb of nuclear survivability the gridmay not appear as the redemptive Internet of our dreams that tech-nology grew directly out of fifteen years of longing for a world stillstanding after thermonuclear war41

4 We Are Become TargetsDuring the years of World War II American and British planners andanalysts learned to see through a bombsight Not in a single glimpsebut in the routine killings and losses that accompanied ever more fre-quently repeated raids Twenty-four hours a day day after day monthafter month year after year the planners and analysts studied andrestudied the interdependencies of the German economy circled tar-gets blasted factories leveled cities analyzed the damage and struckagain Chemicals nitric acid methanol Basic materials rubber steeloil aviation gas Transport systems electrical generators And popula-tion centers area bombing by the combined American and Britishforces killed some 600000 Germans In a war that the Nazis renderedever more vicious even as their defeat seemed inevitable the Americansrsquoearly dreams of precision bombing went by the way Two hundredplanes over Schweinfurt then four hundred but also Hamburg LuumlbeckMuumlnster Berlin Dresden Regensburg year after year Measuring bombloads accuracies reconstruction time 35 ton of bombs per acre toinduce damage of 8 percent delay time for reconstruction two and a

28 Grey Room 04

half months A calculus of fractions probabilities delaysBy the warrsquos end a new category of analyst had come into existence

more often than not social scientists and industrialists but also human-ists diplomats mathematicians and natural scientists Piecing togetherfragments of intelligence examining reconnaissance photographs theypainted an elaborate portrait of a wartime foe By warrsquos end the Surveyanalysts had come to see German and Japanese cities through what onemight call a ldquodestructive functionalismrdquo dependencies leading back-ward they kept hoping to the ever-elusive linchpin that when pulledwould topple the structure Schweinfurt was supposed to be one suchpoint with its all-important bearing factories And after Schweinfurtthere were other ldquobottlenecksrdquo to be targeted other cities other plantsother transshipment points

Perhaps before Hiroshima the bombsight eye had already begun toreect back I donrsquot know But in the atomic rubble as the analysts inter-viewed hundreds of blast survivors and canvassed the broken struc-tures as they methodically noted which kinds of concrete walls stillstood at various radii of destruction they began quite explicitly to seethemselves to see America through the bombardierrsquos eye They beganto wonder what an American city would look like after the bomb hadfallen Returning to the United States and publishing their StrategicBombing Survey things began to look different They began to see them-selves their towns and factories on the crosshairs of radial targetingmaps Far from a technological determinism the all-too material tech-nologies and concepts of self were fully imbricated

One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics launched when NorbertWiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedbackmachine that could be mimicked electronically from there it was a shortstep to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way Then humanphysiology began to appear as a cybernetic system then the humanmind then life then even the world system as a whole42 Somewherein the midst of total war a technocratic vision of a technical EnemyOther rose to become a vision of ourselves It was but a heartbeat beforecybernetics saturated the writings of Gregory Bateson and MargaretMead not to speak of philosophers planners and architects

But the consequence was this Three years before the Russians hadthe bomb in fact before on just about anyonersquos account the cold warhad begun American analysts were already advocating a massive dis-persion of factories and populations against atomic aerial attack

As the cold war arms race accelerated the search for ldquodefense in spacerdquogrew more desperate jet bombers atomic bombs hydrogen bombsintercontinental ballistic missiles With each step more frantic urgingto spread the cities into their ldquomarketing areasrdquo Highway systems

Galison | War against the Center 29

Centralized decentralized and distributed networksSource Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

The similar peril of American cities and the extent to which wisezoning has diminished it differ from city to city Though a reshap-ing and partial dispersal of the national centers of activity aredrastic and difcult measures they represent a social and mili-tary ideal toward which very practical steps can be taken once thepolicy has been laid down19

Efforts toward decentralization remained desultory during 1947But already Congress had ordered the National Security ResourcesBoard to begin exploring industrial relocation Abruptly in the sum-mer of 1949 the laissez-faire mood ended For it was in August that theRussians detonated their rst atomic bomb named by the West Joe 1Despite nearly four years of warning that the Russians would probablyhave nuclear weapons within five years of the Trinity test Americanpolicy experts politicians military officers and atomic scientistsreacted with an alarm bordering on panic Called to offer a response tothe Russian bomb in October 1949 the General Advisory Committee(GAC) under J Robert Oppenheimer convened only to harden theirresistance to further escalation of the arms race In a surprising andunanimous vote the GAC recommended against building the hydrogenbomb on moral grounds A weapon of genocide they asserted an ldquoevilunder lightrdquo It was that anti-H-bomb decision soon ratied by the AtomicEnergy Commissioners that sent a ssure straight down the center of acommunity of scientists grown close-knit during the war

The GACrsquos H-bomb report catalyzed a swift hard struggle betweenopponents and proponents of this new category of weapon Lobbyingbegan in secretmdashand then burst into the public arena after a congressionalleak Editorials in newspapers magazines and television erupted onboth sides with debate continuing all the way up to President Harry S Trumanrsquos decision in January 1950 The country would in fact buildthe hydrogen bomb In June 1950 the Korean War beganmdashmobilizationindustrial and military heightened as never before and the govern-ment inaugurated a still-continuing national commitment to a hugemilitary establishment

It was in this context that in August 1951 the president announceda national policy for industrial dispersion and the National SecurityResources Board quickly followed with a booklet entitled Is Your Planta Target that proclaimed ldquoThe risk of an all-out atomic attack on theUnited States grows greater each day since we are no longer the solepossessor of the secret of the atomic bomb This means that no indus-trial area in the Nation can be considered safe from attackrdquo20 To guar-antee survival the National Security Resources Board insisted wouldrequire that productive capacity be protected ldquoThe dispersion (or

14 Grey Room 04

Site selection for securitySource Industrial DispersionNational Security ResourcesBoard Is Your Plant a Target(Washington DC US Govern-ment Printing Of ce 1951)

deployment in space) of new plant development for war-supportingindustries can make American production less vulnerable to attackrdquoSpace could protect men at the battleeld the authors continued andspace by multiplying targets would diminish ldquothe vulnerability of anyone concentrationrdquo

Behind this national program lay four principles First the disper-sion would be of new industries rather than old second ldquono region ofthe country is to be built up at the expense of anotherrdquo third the dis-persion would take place within so-called ldquomarketing areasrdquo and fourthstate and local governments with private industry would initiate thechange and the federal government would encourage and providetechnical guidance

To tempt industrialists the Feds advertised additional benets thatwould accrue to those industries that dispersed better working andliving conditions for workers greater production by avoiding urbancongestion a healthier more stable economy Adding further quitematerial sweeteners to the mix the federal government promised toallocate ldquocerticates of necessityrdquo critical materials emergency loansand defense contracts to those industries that escaped the connes ofurban concentration Reading the booklet the industrialist and thecivic leader could begin asking themselves these questions

The handy cow pasture on the edge of town may look like a goodsite but does it measure up to the all-important security stan-dards Is it strategically located in relation to labor supply fueltransportation and other requirements for efcient and econom-

Galison | War against the Center 15

ical production Is the site properly located in relation to futurehomes shops schools and other community developments Hasfull consideration been given to efcient wartime productionand long-term benets to industry and community When youhave answered these questions you are on the way to developinga sound industrial dispersion program21

Industrialists swarmed toward Washington to assess the new plansGathered under the auspices of the Executive Ofce of the President

the National Security Resources Board assembled the key players on 7September 1951 in the Executive Ofce Building in Washington DC

Jack Small chairman of the Munitions Board told the assembledthat he was more scared now than when he came down to Washingtonsome nine months earlier

In the intervening time that God has given us we have madeprogress in the production of weapons getting new weaponsmade and creating a force strength but we are not yet ready andwe are in really desperate danger in the event that our enemyattacks For Godrsquos sake donrsquot get the idea that this thing isover or that the danger has nished or that these fanatic enemiesof ours have changed their plans or objectives one iota Theyhave not We will have achieved by next year a posture ofmore strength but still it will not be enough strength to pre-vent aggression

The ldquoall-outrdquo could come at any moment Small insisted to the indus-trialists and it could come by intention or by accident There was onlyone hope ldquoSpace is the one thing that really worksrdquo22

Soon however the discussion turned away from plutonium andtoward prots How queried the representatives from Alabama andLouisiana might this dispersion bring industry to their areas and awayfrom the Northeast which already had such access to the federal silverspoon Industrialists wondered aloud how much federal force-feedingthere would be and the ofcials reassured them that they intended inno way to damage business interests lower productivity or threaten a lossof labor supply This was to be dispersion within a marketing areamdashnot wholesale relocation to distant states

Small and his colleagues in dispersion left the audience withsomewhat vague injunctions But the national policy did vastly moreit aimed to make citizens of every community into target analysts oftheir own region As the Bureau of Commerce patiently explainedldquomaterials and methods for identifying the potential target areas aredescribed on the following pagesrdquo23 Those ldquopotential target areasrdquo

16 Grey Room 04

were the cities and towns of the United States Here is how the Commerce Department directed every community

but especially the top 168 metropolitan areas to proceed First checkthe list of industrial classifications and identify all those plantsemploying more than one hundred workers per peak shift These ranfrom industrial inorganic chemicals coke and byproducts to steelmills engines aircraft scientific instruments photographic equip-ment and ordnance Then identify those locations on a map (naturallynot disclosing the precise role of any single plant to unwanted eyes)Combine this information with outlines of heavily populated sectionsfollowing the information of the Census Bureau Lay out two largemaps (one inch equals one mile) showing political subdivisions arterialhighways railroads ports and harbors alongside industrial areas Nextdraw a series of four-inch (four-mile) circles on transparent overlaysmdashthese correspond to the area destroyed by an atomic bomb

Now you are ready to identify your regionrsquos target zones ldquothose areasthat contain sufcient concentrations of industry or population so asto constitute attractive atom-bomb targetsrdquo24 Just ldquoattractive atom-bombtargetsrdquo not sites ldquolikely to be targeted by the Russiansrdquomdashthe reifiedshorthand compresses all those years of wartime and then postwar tar-geting Your goal in what follows is to use these circles to form a targetout of the city as a whole by transecting the four-mile-diameter circlesonce they are judiciously located In particular the full target will contain both valuable defense-related industries (employing 16000workers in toto) or a residential population of 200000 people

Here is the schematic procedureThis region outlined by the dark line encloses the ldquohighly indus-

trialized sectionrdquo as defined by the National Industrial DispersionProgram Next each community is to plot the census tracts on the sec-ond set of working maps At the center of each tract goes a dot and thepopulation Again you overlay a four-mile transparent circle movingit until it circles a population of 200000 When you connect the centersof these 200000-person circles you have formed a ldquodensely populatedsectionrdquo Next join the two maps in such a way as to form a combinedarea embracing the high density of regions of both industry and popu-lation This joint region the Commerce Department declared wouldbe known as a potential A-bomb target zone From that zone measureten inches (ten miles) out to form the dispersal limit line There is yourgoal Locate all future critical industry and its associated populationspast the line of safety taking care not to create inadvertently a secondarypotential A-bomb target zone

These maps were not designed just to scare they would form witha factory proposal an application for a ldquocerticate of necessityrdquo (granting

Galison | War against the Center 17

18 Grey Room 04

Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo

Boundary of highly industrial ized section

Census-tract population centers with population gures

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of highly industrialized section

Galison | War against the Center 19

Top row left to right Self-targeting step I Take the listof government designated defense-related industries and plot theirlocation and employment This isthe rst task towards the construc-tion of areas known as the highlyindustrialized sections Source USDepartment of Commerce Indus-trial Dispersion Guidebook forCommunities Domestic CommerceSeries no 31 (Washington DCUS Government Printing Of ce1952)

Self-targeting step II To completethe construction of the perimeterof the highly industrialized sectionsdraw circles of four-mile radiusconnect centers of circles contain-ing more than 16000 workersSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step III Label populations from census tractsSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Bottom row left to right Self-targeting step IV To completethe construction of the denselypopulated sections draw circles offour-mile radius and connect thecenters of circles with more than200000 inhabitants SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Self-targeting step V Now super-impose the highly industrializedarea on the densely populatedarea Taken together they form the potential A-bomb Target zoneSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step VI Drawingthe potential A-bomb target zoneon a regional map planners shouldnow construct a safety margin often miles from the outside of theendangered area All new industrialplants should be dispersed out-side this ten-mile radius SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Census-tract population centers with population gures

accelerated tax amortization) facilitating the approval of defense loansand securing defense contracts

Bombing the Axis economy and dispersing the American one werereflections of one another When Charles E Wilson director of theOffice of Defense Mobilization came before the National SecurityResources Board of the Presidentrsquos Executive Office he needed anexpert on how to disperse industry To the captains of industry assem-bled for a 1951 hearing Wilson sought to justify his strictures aboutsplitting plants by ten or twenty miles ldquoMr Gorrie brought me a realexpert on that I call him a real expert because he was one of the menwho had done bombing in the industrial arena of Germany and cer-tainly he convinced me that 10 or 20 miles provides reasonable safetyrdquo25

Bombers braced for bombsIn 1952 Project East River (Associated Universities contracted to the

federal government) reported on how Washington could drive indus-try outside the expanding urban areas ldquoleapfroggingrdquo away from urbancores One role was to create ldquopublic understandingrdquo of the need forldquosatellite townrdquo planning and its defense use More materially theEast River gang reported the federal government should provide aidto assist in the construction of urban arteries to the satellite towns pro-vide rent subsidies to small businesses send appropriations to matchmetropolitan planning units offer tax assistance for new constructionin outlying areas demand dispersal to qualify for federal defenseinsurance and promote federal loans and grants for the constructionof outlying schools streets water and sewers The government shouldsubsidize ring roads around citiesmdashlike Route 128 around Bostonmdashand strive to locate defense industry on it Above all the fast-increas-ing population ofce building and industry heading into cities had tobe reversed Throughout constant vigilance against the re-creation ofnew centers26

Eponymously the report took as its ldquoarea studyrdquo the imagined caseof a Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapon detonated several thousand feetabove a 260-acre rectangle in Manhattan adjacent to the East RiverWith detailed information about the age structure and flammabilityof individual buildingsmdashand recent census datamdashthis not-so-typicalpiece of America could then be tracked as it shattered and burnedunder the assault of nuclear attack How many of the 35000 peopleresiding between 59th and 72nd Streets (between 3rd Avenue and theriver) would become casualties if a weapon were to be exploded at 2 AM How many minutesrsquo warning would they have to take shelterHow much radiation would they receive Would a firestorm eruptBased principally on the results of the US Strategic Bombing Surveyon Hiroshima and Nagasaki this report was in a sense a dully terrifying

20 Grey Room 04

answer to the question the Bombing Survey had posed seven years earlier What would the bombs that were let loose over Hiroshima havelooked like were they to have been dropped back home27

Under the guidance of these various boards and the lucrative drawof taxes loans and contracts one by one key industrial and civic leaderslearned to see themselves through the reflection of a bombsight Oneby one they began plotting their own dispersion In September 1955for example the Chemical and Engineering News reported on atomicvulnerability in the chemical process industry Nuclear weapons jetairplanes and the concept of total war combined wrote Neil P HurleySJ to blur the distinction between military force and industrial poten-tial The role of an industrymdashits functional interdependence on otherindustriesmdashxed the likelihood of its plants becoming targets Chemical-process industries were vulnerable on two fronts geographic concen-tration and functional criticality The conclusion was as inevitable asit was fearsome ldquoThree well-directed H-bombs on these key targetareas would have serious consequences for the industrial chemicalproducing complexrdquo28 Two-thirds of workers making industrial chem-icals lived in ten states

American chemical dispersion in 1955 was directly and explicitlylinked to German chemical dispersion in 1945 Over and over againHurley cited the Strategic Bombing Survey ldquoIt is worth noting thatantifriction bearings represented an Achilles heel in the German econ-omy in World War II The Strategic Bombing Survey indicated a paral-ysis of German industry following Allied air force bombings ofSchweinfurt where more than 50 of German antifriction bearingswere producedrdquo Four H-bombs for example could wipe out half the UScapacity to produce instruments and related products ldquoUnfortunatelythe US has many Schweinfurts In the Great Lakes region are to befound 47 of the nonelectrical machinery productionrdquo A saturationattack on that regionmdashand saturation would not take many bombsmdashwould Hurley noted destroy a vast array of industries including thatof chemicals29

Throughout the 1950s the Strategic Bombing Survey remained cen-tral to thinking about nuclear warfare and the dispersion of industryHurley for example in constructing his report on American chemicalpriorities reproduced the Surveyrsquos list of the ten most vital chemicalsfor the German war effort from nitrogen methanol and calcium car-bide down to caustic soda chlorine and sodium carbonate He reca-pitulated the Surveyrsquos conclusions about the shortages of nitric acid onthe manufacture of explosives the reduction of methanol that cut intothe making of high explosives and the Germansrsquo vain last-ditch effortsto create underground factories In this new narrative Americans

Galison | War against the Center 21

played the role previously performed by Germans Russians took overthe bombing role from the Allies Those who had used their knowledgeof American industry had planned the strategic bombing of the Axisnow they became the potential bombing victims readying plans to disperse Here is Hurley

To avoid a repetition in this country of the unfortunate experi-ences of the Germans during World War II necessary moves mustbe made before any outbreak of hostilities The Germans enjoyedthe luxury of learning from their mistakes It is highly doubtfulwhether in the atomic age any nation will have the same oppor-tunitymdashone mistake may well be the last30

Dispersal could aid in reconstruction and also preventionmdasha strongernation ldquoprotected in spacerdquo (as the phrase went) would deter any attacker

Admiral Ben Moreell retired from the Navy and in the mid-1950schairman of Jones amp Laughlin Steel Corporation had just presented tothe secretary of commerce the manifesto of the purposes of the Ironand Steel Advisory Council The council had urged a mobilization planfor steel in light of the threat presented by high-speed jet airplaneslong-range missiles and nuclear weapons that ldquoour prospectiveenemyrdquo might at any time hurl without warning Big steel needed acomplete control center one linked by telegraph and radio to the steel-making plants Admiral Moreell and his fellow advisers emphasizedthe proximate danger of Russians with H-bombs and in fact asMoreell noted they had one just a few days after his committee laid itsreport at Commerce Worriedly the admiral allowed that 75 percent ofAmerican steelmaking capacity could be destroyed by a mere tenhydrogen bombs The councilrsquos recommendation disperse 25 percentof the capacity in such a way that the resulting plants would be splitup into numerous single-function plants providing each plant with atleast three alternative modes for transporting its products It was timeMoreell intoned to take similar measures in a host of other industriesincluding rubber copper glass aluminum textiles automobiles andelectrical products Prepare for real costs for steel alone the disper-sion bill would run to some $10 billion

Moreell ldquoPerhaps I have overemphasized the hazard under whichwe now live I do not believe so The facts which are coming out withrespect to the tactics and policies of the Communist enemy in Chinaand Korea added to what we already know about them justify the con-clusion that we are facing a ruthless adversary who will permit nohumane consideration to inuence his decisions who will strike with-out prior warning and whose ambition is to rule the worldrdquo31

Dispersion might help the admiral concluded Like so much of this lit-

22 Grey Room 04

Opposite top Where the steelindustry is concentrated Source Admiral Ben MoreellldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do toUS Industriesrdquo US News andWorld Report 7 May 1954

Opposite bottom Destroyingsteel Source Moreell ldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do to USIndustriesrdquo

erature issues of protability and patriotism stood side by side and heconcluded under the ag gesturing to the Founding Father ldquoIn timeof peace prepare for warrdquo

Preparations advanced In 1956 Industrial Development a nationalmagazine dedicated to ldquoarea analysis and business site selectionrdquoreported that the Ofce of Area Development had reviewed and approvedsome fty-eight of the self-prepared urban area surveys Money talkedBy mid-June 1955 projects valued at $30 billion had qualied for taxabatements under the program

Take Milwaukee In December 1953 the cityrsquos mayor Frank Zeidlertraveled to the White House where the president addressed some twohundred large-city mayors in stark terms ldquoFor the rst time in historycities have become principal targets for an enemy seeking to conquerour nation The city has moved from a position of support in the rear Ithas moved out into the front linerdquo Immediately Zeidler arrangedto meet with the Wisconsin governor and the mayors of RacineMadison and Green Joining the chorus of civil defense authorities themayors agreed that in the short term they would need plans for rapidevacuation in the event of a nuclear attack at the same time theyneeded to begin longer-term planning for the dispersal of the city By

Galison | War against the Center 23

May 1954 Milwaukee had its report ldquoNew building in the core of anurban target [ought to] be prohibited except when it replaces existingstructures This is intended to halt the pouring of greater target valuesinto areas which are already richly rewarding as targetsrdquo Spreadingindustry wasnrsquot all that the report advocated The new region wouldneed new school districts novel tax structures and alternative typesof local governments Zoning would force dispersal from the centerinstitute bands of open space and deliver industrial plants to hinter-lands deliberately bypassed by major radial or circumferential roads inorder to avoid creating secondary concentrations ldquoThere is little doubtrdquothe reportrsquos author reckoned ldquothat some of [these] measures wouldhave to be fought through the Supreme Court before they were acceptedby allrdquo32 Pressed by national codes taxes defense spending andimprecations by the president on down local and federal authoritiescompeted to outdo the other in the rush away from the targeted center

America was not alone in declaring war on the urban center Canadain the midst of a major effort to plan urban growth in 1956 also begandefensive dispersal The Ofce of the Civil Defence Coordinator in col-laboration with the Defence Research Board and McGill Universityprepared a Guide to Urban Dispersal ldquoDispersal is the characteristicof present day urban growthrdquo the authors asserted Satellite towns andvillages made urban regions the right scale on which to re-think pat-terns of communication government and demography ldquoDefence iscritical In modern warfare the initial blow is struck at the civilian pop-ulation to destroy at a stroke the ability to resist The greatest vulnera-bility lies in urban concentrationmdashthe greatest security would beachieved by urban dispersalrdquo That dispersal would follow a survey ofa ring located an H-bomb radius away from the regional center That is

24 Grey Room 04

where the Guide came in Based in part on a real area and in part ongeneric characteristics the book was a how-to manual for planning thescattering of the urban into the regional Slope of the land location ofwater avenues of communication and transport needs all had to bereckoned The Guide instructed local leaders and planners how to dia-gram all this for their future Satellite towns would perch outside thering of safetymdashtowns that under no circumstances ought to attractmore than forty thousand inhabitants Ultimately government-pro-pelled ldquourban regionsrdquo would replace the ldquoamorphous formrdquo of currentmetropolitan development alleviating social and economic problemswhile securing spatial defense against thermonuclear attack33 City bycity country by country the bomb helped drive dispersion Indeedcoming full circle the Germans already all too familiar with aerialbombardment began preparing for a rain of hydrogen bombsHannover Bremen and Duumlsseldorf issued the rst three analyses andothers would follow Their comprehensive treatments covered the sta-tus of police re hospital postal service and road service followinga nuclear attack34

Preparation for atomic war was certainly on President Dwight DEisenhowerrsquos mind as he strove to resuscitate the long-debated federalhighway system Franklin D Roosevelt had pushed the idea in the1930s not least for its promise of providing jobs Reports rolled in TheBureau of Public Roads undertook one in 1938 and the chairman ofthat organization presided over another called Interregional Highwaysdated 1943 Other reports and standards marched on through the warwith some actually leading to road buildingmdashin 1947 crews began cut-ting the rst miles of interstate highways Still by the time Eisenhowercame into office in January 1953 there were but six thousand or somiles of road improvements actually on the ground (at a cost of nearly$1 billion)

Eisenhower liked highways He had struggled across the country ina motorized convoy back in 1919 an unpleasant sixty-two days of slip-ping on ice sticking in mud breaking into wooden bridges and freez-ing under snow The contrast with Germany was stark As SupremeCommander General Eisenhower had been astonished by the auto-bahns taking particular note of the advantages that road system affordedas he had to move masses of men and mateacuteriel across the conqueredReich ldquoGermany made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons acrossthe landrdquo On July 12 1954 Vice President Richard Nixon facing theconference of state governors at Lake George New York read fromEisenhowerrsquos prepared speech and the message was clear The obso-lete network had to go its antiquated byways were clogging the roadsand courts while leaving a death toll on the citizenry comparable to

Galison | War against the Center 25

Industrial dispersal 1956 Solidcircles show cities where dispersalplans were approved by late 1955dotted circles indicate communi-ties where plans were under prepa-ration Source Theodore K PasmaldquoIndustrial Dispersal 1956rdquo Indus-trial Development The NationalMagazine of Area Analysis andBusiness Site Selection (January-February 1956)

ldquoa bloody warrdquo But Eisenhowerrsquos final jab at the current system wasstark holding up for public contemplation its ldquoappalling inadequaciesto meet the demands of catastrophe or defense should an atomic warcomerdquo35 Radial roads would afford clear routes for city evacuationCircumferential roads Project East River had recommended back in1952 should be encouraged wherever possible to drain industry andpopulation from the dense city centers36 In fact highway designersconsulted with federal civil defense agencies and military plannersaimed for interstate highways that would bypass urban areas to avoidldquoroute[s] that had suffered a direct A-bomb hitrdquo37 It took two years ofpolitical wrangling and it goes without saying that economic housingand non-nuclear forces for the interstate were surely among its powerfulmotors By the end of 1956 the Interstate and Defense Highway Systemhad fundingmdashsome $25 billion of federal support38

3 Distributed KnowledgeBy 1960 the Air Force began dreaming worse nightmares than nuke-ladenbombers bullying their way past ghter defense Atomic strikes againstthe continental United States could be launched with missiles forwhich range of ight was no longer an issue The RAND Corporationmade its mark with contracts to think about this thermonuclear threatfrom the new think tank issued shelves of studies including thefamous (and famously parodied) volume by Herman Kahn On Thermo-nuclear War Just as Kahn stepped into the limelight the much lesswell known Paul Baran an electrical engineer coming from HughesAircraft Companyrsquos systems group joined RAND His job was todevelop a scheme that would ensure the survival of the US telecom-munications infrastructure through a Russian rst strikemdasha vital linknot only for domestic communication but also for command and con-trol His response in a series of papers launched in 1960 was a plan toremove completely critical nodes from the telephone system Like thethree highways many wanted from each dispersed defense plantBaranrsquos vision aimed for safety in redundantly connected spatially dis-tributed mini-centers

Here is how Baran put it in one of his rst papers

The cloud-of-doom attitude that nuclear war spells the end of theearth is slowly lifting from the minds of the many Better quanti-tative estimates of post-attack destruction together with a lessemotional discussion of the alternatives may mark the end of theldquowhat the hellmdashwhatrsquos the userdquo era A new view emerges the pos-sibility of a war exists but there is much that can be done to min-imize the consequences

26 Grey Room 04

De nition of redundancy Paul Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunications I Introductionto Distributed CommunicationsNetworkrdquo RAND Corporationmemorandum RM-3420-PRAugust 1964

Survivable atomic warmdashthe goal of the fteen-year struggle since theSurvey crew picked through the still radioactive rubble at HiroshimaBaran again

If war does not mean the end of the earth in a black and whitemanner then it follows that we should do those things that makethe shade of gray as light as possible to plan now to minimizepotential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permitthe survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstructthe economy swiftly39

That reconstruction demanded the elimination of the hierarchical center alternately referred to over these rst decades of the cold war asthe linchpin the bottleneck and the node

The problem as Baran formulated it did involve new equipment tolabel digitally each packet of information with a ldquotordquo and ldquofromrdquo andthen to route these fragments over diverse paths toward their eventualreassembly on arrival But before anything could be built moved dig-itized or reinforced the conceptual problem required attention Thatreconceptualization now took as it had not before a mathematicalform If nodes were replaced with redundant links how could heexploit the information-theoretic approach of Claude Shannon to countthe surviving paths between points in the array

Here is how Baran reasoned

Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network whichwill allow several hundred major communications stations to talkwith one another after an enemy attack As a criterion of surviv-ability we elect to use the percentage of stations both survivingthe physical attack and remaining in electrical connection withthe largest single group of surviving stations This criterion ischosen as a conservative measure of the ability of the survivingstations to operate together as a coherent entity after the attack40

With the result that a redundancy of at least R = 3would ensure a likely survival rate of nearly 75 percentBaran could now sketch the distributed system thatwould vouchsafe communication after nuclear war

Worst obviously was the centralized node that rep-resented the single critical target This was the situationwith concentrated steel electricity or oil plants it wasthe structure of the hubbed railway system It was inshort the bombing plannerrsquos dream and the bombingvictimrsquos nightmare Decentralized nodes that main-tained a local hierarchical structure were clearly better

Galison | War against the Center 27

a complete grid structure was best of all To a certain extent such gridsstood for the defensive ideal of dispersion more generally By increasingthe number of targets one decreased the likelihood of incapacitationHalting abortive and awkward though it was Baranrsquos scheme (alongwith a similar one developed in England) slowly wended its way throughdifferent incarnations in the ARPANET and Milnet But the elusivegoal all through these decades of distributed communication was a dis-tributed grid or mesh a thrust in the rst instance aimed at removingthe critical node Though in the garb of nuclear survivability the gridmay not appear as the redemptive Internet of our dreams that tech-nology grew directly out of fifteen years of longing for a world stillstanding after thermonuclear war41

4 We Are Become TargetsDuring the years of World War II American and British planners andanalysts learned to see through a bombsight Not in a single glimpsebut in the routine killings and losses that accompanied ever more fre-quently repeated raids Twenty-four hours a day day after day monthafter month year after year the planners and analysts studied andrestudied the interdependencies of the German economy circled tar-gets blasted factories leveled cities analyzed the damage and struckagain Chemicals nitric acid methanol Basic materials rubber steeloil aviation gas Transport systems electrical generators And popula-tion centers area bombing by the combined American and Britishforces killed some 600000 Germans In a war that the Nazis renderedever more vicious even as their defeat seemed inevitable the Americansrsquoearly dreams of precision bombing went by the way Two hundredplanes over Schweinfurt then four hundred but also Hamburg LuumlbeckMuumlnster Berlin Dresden Regensburg year after year Measuring bombloads accuracies reconstruction time 35 ton of bombs per acre toinduce damage of 8 percent delay time for reconstruction two and a

28 Grey Room 04

half months A calculus of fractions probabilities delaysBy the warrsquos end a new category of analyst had come into existence

more often than not social scientists and industrialists but also human-ists diplomats mathematicians and natural scientists Piecing togetherfragments of intelligence examining reconnaissance photographs theypainted an elaborate portrait of a wartime foe By warrsquos end the Surveyanalysts had come to see German and Japanese cities through what onemight call a ldquodestructive functionalismrdquo dependencies leading back-ward they kept hoping to the ever-elusive linchpin that when pulledwould topple the structure Schweinfurt was supposed to be one suchpoint with its all-important bearing factories And after Schweinfurtthere were other ldquobottlenecksrdquo to be targeted other cities other plantsother transshipment points

Perhaps before Hiroshima the bombsight eye had already begun toreect back I donrsquot know But in the atomic rubble as the analysts inter-viewed hundreds of blast survivors and canvassed the broken struc-tures as they methodically noted which kinds of concrete walls stillstood at various radii of destruction they began quite explicitly to seethemselves to see America through the bombardierrsquos eye They beganto wonder what an American city would look like after the bomb hadfallen Returning to the United States and publishing their StrategicBombing Survey things began to look different They began to see them-selves their towns and factories on the crosshairs of radial targetingmaps Far from a technological determinism the all-too material tech-nologies and concepts of self were fully imbricated

One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics launched when NorbertWiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedbackmachine that could be mimicked electronically from there it was a shortstep to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way Then humanphysiology began to appear as a cybernetic system then the humanmind then life then even the world system as a whole42 Somewherein the midst of total war a technocratic vision of a technical EnemyOther rose to become a vision of ourselves It was but a heartbeat beforecybernetics saturated the writings of Gregory Bateson and MargaretMead not to speak of philosophers planners and architects

But the consequence was this Three years before the Russians hadthe bomb in fact before on just about anyonersquos account the cold warhad begun American analysts were already advocating a massive dis-persion of factories and populations against atomic aerial attack

As the cold war arms race accelerated the search for ldquodefense in spacerdquogrew more desperate jet bombers atomic bombs hydrogen bombsintercontinental ballistic missiles With each step more frantic urgingto spread the cities into their ldquomarketing areasrdquo Highway systems

Galison | War against the Center 29

Centralized decentralized and distributed networksSource Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

deployment in space) of new plant development for war-supportingindustries can make American production less vulnerable to attackrdquoSpace could protect men at the battleeld the authors continued andspace by multiplying targets would diminish ldquothe vulnerability of anyone concentrationrdquo

Behind this national program lay four principles First the disper-sion would be of new industries rather than old second ldquono region ofthe country is to be built up at the expense of anotherrdquo third the dis-persion would take place within so-called ldquomarketing areasrdquo and fourthstate and local governments with private industry would initiate thechange and the federal government would encourage and providetechnical guidance

To tempt industrialists the Feds advertised additional benets thatwould accrue to those industries that dispersed better working andliving conditions for workers greater production by avoiding urbancongestion a healthier more stable economy Adding further quitematerial sweeteners to the mix the federal government promised toallocate ldquocerticates of necessityrdquo critical materials emergency loansand defense contracts to those industries that escaped the connes ofurban concentration Reading the booklet the industrialist and thecivic leader could begin asking themselves these questions

The handy cow pasture on the edge of town may look like a goodsite but does it measure up to the all-important security stan-dards Is it strategically located in relation to labor supply fueltransportation and other requirements for efcient and econom-

Galison | War against the Center 15

ical production Is the site properly located in relation to futurehomes shops schools and other community developments Hasfull consideration been given to efcient wartime productionand long-term benets to industry and community When youhave answered these questions you are on the way to developinga sound industrial dispersion program21

Industrialists swarmed toward Washington to assess the new plansGathered under the auspices of the Executive Ofce of the President

the National Security Resources Board assembled the key players on 7September 1951 in the Executive Ofce Building in Washington DC

Jack Small chairman of the Munitions Board told the assembledthat he was more scared now than when he came down to Washingtonsome nine months earlier

In the intervening time that God has given us we have madeprogress in the production of weapons getting new weaponsmade and creating a force strength but we are not yet ready andwe are in really desperate danger in the event that our enemyattacks For Godrsquos sake donrsquot get the idea that this thing isover or that the danger has nished or that these fanatic enemiesof ours have changed their plans or objectives one iota Theyhave not We will have achieved by next year a posture ofmore strength but still it will not be enough strength to pre-vent aggression

The ldquoall-outrdquo could come at any moment Small insisted to the indus-trialists and it could come by intention or by accident There was onlyone hope ldquoSpace is the one thing that really worksrdquo22

Soon however the discussion turned away from plutonium andtoward prots How queried the representatives from Alabama andLouisiana might this dispersion bring industry to their areas and awayfrom the Northeast which already had such access to the federal silverspoon Industrialists wondered aloud how much federal force-feedingthere would be and the ofcials reassured them that they intended inno way to damage business interests lower productivity or threaten a lossof labor supply This was to be dispersion within a marketing areamdashnot wholesale relocation to distant states

Small and his colleagues in dispersion left the audience withsomewhat vague injunctions But the national policy did vastly moreit aimed to make citizens of every community into target analysts oftheir own region As the Bureau of Commerce patiently explainedldquomaterials and methods for identifying the potential target areas aredescribed on the following pagesrdquo23 Those ldquopotential target areasrdquo

16 Grey Room 04

were the cities and towns of the United States Here is how the Commerce Department directed every community

but especially the top 168 metropolitan areas to proceed First checkthe list of industrial classifications and identify all those plantsemploying more than one hundred workers per peak shift These ranfrom industrial inorganic chemicals coke and byproducts to steelmills engines aircraft scientific instruments photographic equip-ment and ordnance Then identify those locations on a map (naturallynot disclosing the precise role of any single plant to unwanted eyes)Combine this information with outlines of heavily populated sectionsfollowing the information of the Census Bureau Lay out two largemaps (one inch equals one mile) showing political subdivisions arterialhighways railroads ports and harbors alongside industrial areas Nextdraw a series of four-inch (four-mile) circles on transparent overlaysmdashthese correspond to the area destroyed by an atomic bomb

Now you are ready to identify your regionrsquos target zones ldquothose areasthat contain sufcient concentrations of industry or population so asto constitute attractive atom-bomb targetsrdquo24 Just ldquoattractive atom-bombtargetsrdquo not sites ldquolikely to be targeted by the Russiansrdquomdashthe reifiedshorthand compresses all those years of wartime and then postwar tar-geting Your goal in what follows is to use these circles to form a targetout of the city as a whole by transecting the four-mile-diameter circlesonce they are judiciously located In particular the full target will contain both valuable defense-related industries (employing 16000workers in toto) or a residential population of 200000 people

Here is the schematic procedureThis region outlined by the dark line encloses the ldquohighly indus-

trialized sectionrdquo as defined by the National Industrial DispersionProgram Next each community is to plot the census tracts on the sec-ond set of working maps At the center of each tract goes a dot and thepopulation Again you overlay a four-mile transparent circle movingit until it circles a population of 200000 When you connect the centersof these 200000-person circles you have formed a ldquodensely populatedsectionrdquo Next join the two maps in such a way as to form a combinedarea embracing the high density of regions of both industry and popu-lation This joint region the Commerce Department declared wouldbe known as a potential A-bomb target zone From that zone measureten inches (ten miles) out to form the dispersal limit line There is yourgoal Locate all future critical industry and its associated populationspast the line of safety taking care not to create inadvertently a secondarypotential A-bomb target zone

These maps were not designed just to scare they would form witha factory proposal an application for a ldquocerticate of necessityrdquo (granting

Galison | War against the Center 17

18 Grey Room 04

Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo

Boundary of highly industrial ized section

Census-tract population centers with population gures

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of highly industrialized section

Galison | War against the Center 19

Top row left to right Self-targeting step I Take the listof government designated defense-related industries and plot theirlocation and employment This isthe rst task towards the construc-tion of areas known as the highlyindustrialized sections Source USDepartment of Commerce Indus-trial Dispersion Guidebook forCommunities Domestic CommerceSeries no 31 (Washington DCUS Government Printing Of ce1952)

Self-targeting step II To completethe construction of the perimeterof the highly industrialized sectionsdraw circles of four-mile radiusconnect centers of circles contain-ing more than 16000 workersSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step III Label populations from census tractsSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Bottom row left to right Self-targeting step IV To completethe construction of the denselypopulated sections draw circles offour-mile radius and connect thecenters of circles with more than200000 inhabitants SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Self-targeting step V Now super-impose the highly industrializedarea on the densely populatedarea Taken together they form the potential A-bomb Target zoneSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step VI Drawingthe potential A-bomb target zoneon a regional map planners shouldnow construct a safety margin often miles from the outside of theendangered area All new industrialplants should be dispersed out-side this ten-mile radius SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Census-tract population centers with population gures

accelerated tax amortization) facilitating the approval of defense loansand securing defense contracts

Bombing the Axis economy and dispersing the American one werereflections of one another When Charles E Wilson director of theOffice of Defense Mobilization came before the National SecurityResources Board of the Presidentrsquos Executive Office he needed anexpert on how to disperse industry To the captains of industry assem-bled for a 1951 hearing Wilson sought to justify his strictures aboutsplitting plants by ten or twenty miles ldquoMr Gorrie brought me a realexpert on that I call him a real expert because he was one of the menwho had done bombing in the industrial arena of Germany and cer-tainly he convinced me that 10 or 20 miles provides reasonable safetyrdquo25

Bombers braced for bombsIn 1952 Project East River (Associated Universities contracted to the

federal government) reported on how Washington could drive indus-try outside the expanding urban areas ldquoleapfroggingrdquo away from urbancores One role was to create ldquopublic understandingrdquo of the need forldquosatellite townrdquo planning and its defense use More materially theEast River gang reported the federal government should provide aidto assist in the construction of urban arteries to the satellite towns pro-vide rent subsidies to small businesses send appropriations to matchmetropolitan planning units offer tax assistance for new constructionin outlying areas demand dispersal to qualify for federal defenseinsurance and promote federal loans and grants for the constructionof outlying schools streets water and sewers The government shouldsubsidize ring roads around citiesmdashlike Route 128 around Bostonmdashand strive to locate defense industry on it Above all the fast-increas-ing population ofce building and industry heading into cities had tobe reversed Throughout constant vigilance against the re-creation ofnew centers26

Eponymously the report took as its ldquoarea studyrdquo the imagined caseof a Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapon detonated several thousand feetabove a 260-acre rectangle in Manhattan adjacent to the East RiverWith detailed information about the age structure and flammabilityof individual buildingsmdashand recent census datamdashthis not-so-typicalpiece of America could then be tracked as it shattered and burnedunder the assault of nuclear attack How many of the 35000 peopleresiding between 59th and 72nd Streets (between 3rd Avenue and theriver) would become casualties if a weapon were to be exploded at 2 AM How many minutesrsquo warning would they have to take shelterHow much radiation would they receive Would a firestorm eruptBased principally on the results of the US Strategic Bombing Surveyon Hiroshima and Nagasaki this report was in a sense a dully terrifying

20 Grey Room 04

answer to the question the Bombing Survey had posed seven years earlier What would the bombs that were let loose over Hiroshima havelooked like were they to have been dropped back home27

Under the guidance of these various boards and the lucrative drawof taxes loans and contracts one by one key industrial and civic leaderslearned to see themselves through the reflection of a bombsight Oneby one they began plotting their own dispersion In September 1955for example the Chemical and Engineering News reported on atomicvulnerability in the chemical process industry Nuclear weapons jetairplanes and the concept of total war combined wrote Neil P HurleySJ to blur the distinction between military force and industrial poten-tial The role of an industrymdashits functional interdependence on otherindustriesmdashxed the likelihood of its plants becoming targets Chemical-process industries were vulnerable on two fronts geographic concen-tration and functional criticality The conclusion was as inevitable asit was fearsome ldquoThree well-directed H-bombs on these key targetareas would have serious consequences for the industrial chemicalproducing complexrdquo28 Two-thirds of workers making industrial chem-icals lived in ten states

American chemical dispersion in 1955 was directly and explicitlylinked to German chemical dispersion in 1945 Over and over againHurley cited the Strategic Bombing Survey ldquoIt is worth noting thatantifriction bearings represented an Achilles heel in the German econ-omy in World War II The Strategic Bombing Survey indicated a paral-ysis of German industry following Allied air force bombings ofSchweinfurt where more than 50 of German antifriction bearingswere producedrdquo Four H-bombs for example could wipe out half the UScapacity to produce instruments and related products ldquoUnfortunatelythe US has many Schweinfurts In the Great Lakes region are to befound 47 of the nonelectrical machinery productionrdquo A saturationattack on that regionmdashand saturation would not take many bombsmdashwould Hurley noted destroy a vast array of industries including thatof chemicals29

Throughout the 1950s the Strategic Bombing Survey remained cen-tral to thinking about nuclear warfare and the dispersion of industryHurley for example in constructing his report on American chemicalpriorities reproduced the Surveyrsquos list of the ten most vital chemicalsfor the German war effort from nitrogen methanol and calcium car-bide down to caustic soda chlorine and sodium carbonate He reca-pitulated the Surveyrsquos conclusions about the shortages of nitric acid onthe manufacture of explosives the reduction of methanol that cut intothe making of high explosives and the Germansrsquo vain last-ditch effortsto create underground factories In this new narrative Americans

Galison | War against the Center 21

played the role previously performed by Germans Russians took overthe bombing role from the Allies Those who had used their knowledgeof American industry had planned the strategic bombing of the Axisnow they became the potential bombing victims readying plans to disperse Here is Hurley

To avoid a repetition in this country of the unfortunate experi-ences of the Germans during World War II necessary moves mustbe made before any outbreak of hostilities The Germans enjoyedthe luxury of learning from their mistakes It is highly doubtfulwhether in the atomic age any nation will have the same oppor-tunitymdashone mistake may well be the last30

Dispersal could aid in reconstruction and also preventionmdasha strongernation ldquoprotected in spacerdquo (as the phrase went) would deter any attacker

Admiral Ben Moreell retired from the Navy and in the mid-1950schairman of Jones amp Laughlin Steel Corporation had just presented tothe secretary of commerce the manifesto of the purposes of the Ironand Steel Advisory Council The council had urged a mobilization planfor steel in light of the threat presented by high-speed jet airplaneslong-range missiles and nuclear weapons that ldquoour prospectiveenemyrdquo might at any time hurl without warning Big steel needed acomplete control center one linked by telegraph and radio to the steel-making plants Admiral Moreell and his fellow advisers emphasizedthe proximate danger of Russians with H-bombs and in fact asMoreell noted they had one just a few days after his committee laid itsreport at Commerce Worriedly the admiral allowed that 75 percent ofAmerican steelmaking capacity could be destroyed by a mere tenhydrogen bombs The councilrsquos recommendation disperse 25 percentof the capacity in such a way that the resulting plants would be splitup into numerous single-function plants providing each plant with atleast three alternative modes for transporting its products It was timeMoreell intoned to take similar measures in a host of other industriesincluding rubber copper glass aluminum textiles automobiles andelectrical products Prepare for real costs for steel alone the disper-sion bill would run to some $10 billion

Moreell ldquoPerhaps I have overemphasized the hazard under whichwe now live I do not believe so The facts which are coming out withrespect to the tactics and policies of the Communist enemy in Chinaand Korea added to what we already know about them justify the con-clusion that we are facing a ruthless adversary who will permit nohumane consideration to inuence his decisions who will strike with-out prior warning and whose ambition is to rule the worldrdquo31

Dispersion might help the admiral concluded Like so much of this lit-

22 Grey Room 04

Opposite top Where the steelindustry is concentrated Source Admiral Ben MoreellldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do toUS Industriesrdquo US News andWorld Report 7 May 1954

Opposite bottom Destroyingsteel Source Moreell ldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do to USIndustriesrdquo

erature issues of protability and patriotism stood side by side and heconcluded under the ag gesturing to the Founding Father ldquoIn timeof peace prepare for warrdquo

Preparations advanced In 1956 Industrial Development a nationalmagazine dedicated to ldquoarea analysis and business site selectionrdquoreported that the Ofce of Area Development had reviewed and approvedsome fty-eight of the self-prepared urban area surveys Money talkedBy mid-June 1955 projects valued at $30 billion had qualied for taxabatements under the program

Take Milwaukee In December 1953 the cityrsquos mayor Frank Zeidlertraveled to the White House where the president addressed some twohundred large-city mayors in stark terms ldquoFor the rst time in historycities have become principal targets for an enemy seeking to conquerour nation The city has moved from a position of support in the rear Ithas moved out into the front linerdquo Immediately Zeidler arrangedto meet with the Wisconsin governor and the mayors of RacineMadison and Green Joining the chorus of civil defense authorities themayors agreed that in the short term they would need plans for rapidevacuation in the event of a nuclear attack at the same time theyneeded to begin longer-term planning for the dispersal of the city By

Galison | War against the Center 23

May 1954 Milwaukee had its report ldquoNew building in the core of anurban target [ought to] be prohibited except when it replaces existingstructures This is intended to halt the pouring of greater target valuesinto areas which are already richly rewarding as targetsrdquo Spreadingindustry wasnrsquot all that the report advocated The new region wouldneed new school districts novel tax structures and alternative typesof local governments Zoning would force dispersal from the centerinstitute bands of open space and deliver industrial plants to hinter-lands deliberately bypassed by major radial or circumferential roads inorder to avoid creating secondary concentrations ldquoThere is little doubtrdquothe reportrsquos author reckoned ldquothat some of [these] measures wouldhave to be fought through the Supreme Court before they were acceptedby allrdquo32 Pressed by national codes taxes defense spending andimprecations by the president on down local and federal authoritiescompeted to outdo the other in the rush away from the targeted center

America was not alone in declaring war on the urban center Canadain the midst of a major effort to plan urban growth in 1956 also begandefensive dispersal The Ofce of the Civil Defence Coordinator in col-laboration with the Defence Research Board and McGill Universityprepared a Guide to Urban Dispersal ldquoDispersal is the characteristicof present day urban growthrdquo the authors asserted Satellite towns andvillages made urban regions the right scale on which to re-think pat-terns of communication government and demography ldquoDefence iscritical In modern warfare the initial blow is struck at the civilian pop-ulation to destroy at a stroke the ability to resist The greatest vulnera-bility lies in urban concentrationmdashthe greatest security would beachieved by urban dispersalrdquo That dispersal would follow a survey ofa ring located an H-bomb radius away from the regional center That is

24 Grey Room 04

where the Guide came in Based in part on a real area and in part ongeneric characteristics the book was a how-to manual for planning thescattering of the urban into the regional Slope of the land location ofwater avenues of communication and transport needs all had to bereckoned The Guide instructed local leaders and planners how to dia-gram all this for their future Satellite towns would perch outside thering of safetymdashtowns that under no circumstances ought to attractmore than forty thousand inhabitants Ultimately government-pro-pelled ldquourban regionsrdquo would replace the ldquoamorphous formrdquo of currentmetropolitan development alleviating social and economic problemswhile securing spatial defense against thermonuclear attack33 City bycity country by country the bomb helped drive dispersion Indeedcoming full circle the Germans already all too familiar with aerialbombardment began preparing for a rain of hydrogen bombsHannover Bremen and Duumlsseldorf issued the rst three analyses andothers would follow Their comprehensive treatments covered the sta-tus of police re hospital postal service and road service followinga nuclear attack34

Preparation for atomic war was certainly on President Dwight DEisenhowerrsquos mind as he strove to resuscitate the long-debated federalhighway system Franklin D Roosevelt had pushed the idea in the1930s not least for its promise of providing jobs Reports rolled in TheBureau of Public Roads undertook one in 1938 and the chairman ofthat organization presided over another called Interregional Highwaysdated 1943 Other reports and standards marched on through the warwith some actually leading to road buildingmdashin 1947 crews began cut-ting the rst miles of interstate highways Still by the time Eisenhowercame into office in January 1953 there were but six thousand or somiles of road improvements actually on the ground (at a cost of nearly$1 billion)

Eisenhower liked highways He had struggled across the country ina motorized convoy back in 1919 an unpleasant sixty-two days of slip-ping on ice sticking in mud breaking into wooden bridges and freez-ing under snow The contrast with Germany was stark As SupremeCommander General Eisenhower had been astonished by the auto-bahns taking particular note of the advantages that road system affordedas he had to move masses of men and mateacuteriel across the conqueredReich ldquoGermany made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons acrossthe landrdquo On July 12 1954 Vice President Richard Nixon facing theconference of state governors at Lake George New York read fromEisenhowerrsquos prepared speech and the message was clear The obso-lete network had to go its antiquated byways were clogging the roadsand courts while leaving a death toll on the citizenry comparable to

Galison | War against the Center 25

Industrial dispersal 1956 Solidcircles show cities where dispersalplans were approved by late 1955dotted circles indicate communi-ties where plans were under prepa-ration Source Theodore K PasmaldquoIndustrial Dispersal 1956rdquo Indus-trial Development The NationalMagazine of Area Analysis andBusiness Site Selection (January-February 1956)

ldquoa bloody warrdquo But Eisenhowerrsquos final jab at the current system wasstark holding up for public contemplation its ldquoappalling inadequaciesto meet the demands of catastrophe or defense should an atomic warcomerdquo35 Radial roads would afford clear routes for city evacuationCircumferential roads Project East River had recommended back in1952 should be encouraged wherever possible to drain industry andpopulation from the dense city centers36 In fact highway designersconsulted with federal civil defense agencies and military plannersaimed for interstate highways that would bypass urban areas to avoidldquoroute[s] that had suffered a direct A-bomb hitrdquo37 It took two years ofpolitical wrangling and it goes without saying that economic housingand non-nuclear forces for the interstate were surely among its powerfulmotors By the end of 1956 the Interstate and Defense Highway Systemhad fundingmdashsome $25 billion of federal support38

3 Distributed KnowledgeBy 1960 the Air Force began dreaming worse nightmares than nuke-ladenbombers bullying their way past ghter defense Atomic strikes againstthe continental United States could be launched with missiles forwhich range of ight was no longer an issue The RAND Corporationmade its mark with contracts to think about this thermonuclear threatfrom the new think tank issued shelves of studies including thefamous (and famously parodied) volume by Herman Kahn On Thermo-nuclear War Just as Kahn stepped into the limelight the much lesswell known Paul Baran an electrical engineer coming from HughesAircraft Companyrsquos systems group joined RAND His job was todevelop a scheme that would ensure the survival of the US telecom-munications infrastructure through a Russian rst strikemdasha vital linknot only for domestic communication but also for command and con-trol His response in a series of papers launched in 1960 was a plan toremove completely critical nodes from the telephone system Like thethree highways many wanted from each dispersed defense plantBaranrsquos vision aimed for safety in redundantly connected spatially dis-tributed mini-centers

Here is how Baran put it in one of his rst papers

The cloud-of-doom attitude that nuclear war spells the end of theearth is slowly lifting from the minds of the many Better quanti-tative estimates of post-attack destruction together with a lessemotional discussion of the alternatives may mark the end of theldquowhat the hellmdashwhatrsquos the userdquo era A new view emerges the pos-sibility of a war exists but there is much that can be done to min-imize the consequences

26 Grey Room 04

De nition of redundancy Paul Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunications I Introductionto Distributed CommunicationsNetworkrdquo RAND Corporationmemorandum RM-3420-PRAugust 1964

Survivable atomic warmdashthe goal of the fteen-year struggle since theSurvey crew picked through the still radioactive rubble at HiroshimaBaran again

If war does not mean the end of the earth in a black and whitemanner then it follows that we should do those things that makethe shade of gray as light as possible to plan now to minimizepotential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permitthe survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstructthe economy swiftly39

That reconstruction demanded the elimination of the hierarchical center alternately referred to over these rst decades of the cold war asthe linchpin the bottleneck and the node

The problem as Baran formulated it did involve new equipment tolabel digitally each packet of information with a ldquotordquo and ldquofromrdquo andthen to route these fragments over diverse paths toward their eventualreassembly on arrival But before anything could be built moved dig-itized or reinforced the conceptual problem required attention Thatreconceptualization now took as it had not before a mathematicalform If nodes were replaced with redundant links how could heexploit the information-theoretic approach of Claude Shannon to countthe surviving paths between points in the array

Here is how Baran reasoned

Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network whichwill allow several hundred major communications stations to talkwith one another after an enemy attack As a criterion of surviv-ability we elect to use the percentage of stations both survivingthe physical attack and remaining in electrical connection withthe largest single group of surviving stations This criterion ischosen as a conservative measure of the ability of the survivingstations to operate together as a coherent entity after the attack40

With the result that a redundancy of at least R = 3would ensure a likely survival rate of nearly 75 percentBaran could now sketch the distributed system thatwould vouchsafe communication after nuclear war

Worst obviously was the centralized node that rep-resented the single critical target This was the situationwith concentrated steel electricity or oil plants it wasthe structure of the hubbed railway system It was inshort the bombing plannerrsquos dream and the bombingvictimrsquos nightmare Decentralized nodes that main-tained a local hierarchical structure were clearly better

Galison | War against the Center 27

a complete grid structure was best of all To a certain extent such gridsstood for the defensive ideal of dispersion more generally By increasingthe number of targets one decreased the likelihood of incapacitationHalting abortive and awkward though it was Baranrsquos scheme (alongwith a similar one developed in England) slowly wended its way throughdifferent incarnations in the ARPANET and Milnet But the elusivegoal all through these decades of distributed communication was a dis-tributed grid or mesh a thrust in the rst instance aimed at removingthe critical node Though in the garb of nuclear survivability the gridmay not appear as the redemptive Internet of our dreams that tech-nology grew directly out of fifteen years of longing for a world stillstanding after thermonuclear war41

4 We Are Become TargetsDuring the years of World War II American and British planners andanalysts learned to see through a bombsight Not in a single glimpsebut in the routine killings and losses that accompanied ever more fre-quently repeated raids Twenty-four hours a day day after day monthafter month year after year the planners and analysts studied andrestudied the interdependencies of the German economy circled tar-gets blasted factories leveled cities analyzed the damage and struckagain Chemicals nitric acid methanol Basic materials rubber steeloil aviation gas Transport systems electrical generators And popula-tion centers area bombing by the combined American and Britishforces killed some 600000 Germans In a war that the Nazis renderedever more vicious even as their defeat seemed inevitable the Americansrsquoearly dreams of precision bombing went by the way Two hundredplanes over Schweinfurt then four hundred but also Hamburg LuumlbeckMuumlnster Berlin Dresden Regensburg year after year Measuring bombloads accuracies reconstruction time 35 ton of bombs per acre toinduce damage of 8 percent delay time for reconstruction two and a

28 Grey Room 04

half months A calculus of fractions probabilities delaysBy the warrsquos end a new category of analyst had come into existence

more often than not social scientists and industrialists but also human-ists diplomats mathematicians and natural scientists Piecing togetherfragments of intelligence examining reconnaissance photographs theypainted an elaborate portrait of a wartime foe By warrsquos end the Surveyanalysts had come to see German and Japanese cities through what onemight call a ldquodestructive functionalismrdquo dependencies leading back-ward they kept hoping to the ever-elusive linchpin that when pulledwould topple the structure Schweinfurt was supposed to be one suchpoint with its all-important bearing factories And after Schweinfurtthere were other ldquobottlenecksrdquo to be targeted other cities other plantsother transshipment points

Perhaps before Hiroshima the bombsight eye had already begun toreect back I donrsquot know But in the atomic rubble as the analysts inter-viewed hundreds of blast survivors and canvassed the broken struc-tures as they methodically noted which kinds of concrete walls stillstood at various radii of destruction they began quite explicitly to seethemselves to see America through the bombardierrsquos eye They beganto wonder what an American city would look like after the bomb hadfallen Returning to the United States and publishing their StrategicBombing Survey things began to look different They began to see them-selves their towns and factories on the crosshairs of radial targetingmaps Far from a technological determinism the all-too material tech-nologies and concepts of self were fully imbricated

One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics launched when NorbertWiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedbackmachine that could be mimicked electronically from there it was a shortstep to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way Then humanphysiology began to appear as a cybernetic system then the humanmind then life then even the world system as a whole42 Somewherein the midst of total war a technocratic vision of a technical EnemyOther rose to become a vision of ourselves It was but a heartbeat beforecybernetics saturated the writings of Gregory Bateson and MargaretMead not to speak of philosophers planners and architects

But the consequence was this Three years before the Russians hadthe bomb in fact before on just about anyonersquos account the cold warhad begun American analysts were already advocating a massive dis-persion of factories and populations against atomic aerial attack

As the cold war arms race accelerated the search for ldquodefense in spacerdquogrew more desperate jet bombers atomic bombs hydrogen bombsintercontinental ballistic missiles With each step more frantic urgingto spread the cities into their ldquomarketing areasrdquo Highway systems

Galison | War against the Center 29

Centralized decentralized and distributed networksSource Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

ical production Is the site properly located in relation to futurehomes shops schools and other community developments Hasfull consideration been given to efcient wartime productionand long-term benets to industry and community When youhave answered these questions you are on the way to developinga sound industrial dispersion program21

Industrialists swarmed toward Washington to assess the new plansGathered under the auspices of the Executive Ofce of the President

the National Security Resources Board assembled the key players on 7September 1951 in the Executive Ofce Building in Washington DC

Jack Small chairman of the Munitions Board told the assembledthat he was more scared now than when he came down to Washingtonsome nine months earlier

In the intervening time that God has given us we have madeprogress in the production of weapons getting new weaponsmade and creating a force strength but we are not yet ready andwe are in really desperate danger in the event that our enemyattacks For Godrsquos sake donrsquot get the idea that this thing isover or that the danger has nished or that these fanatic enemiesof ours have changed their plans or objectives one iota Theyhave not We will have achieved by next year a posture ofmore strength but still it will not be enough strength to pre-vent aggression

The ldquoall-outrdquo could come at any moment Small insisted to the indus-trialists and it could come by intention or by accident There was onlyone hope ldquoSpace is the one thing that really worksrdquo22

Soon however the discussion turned away from plutonium andtoward prots How queried the representatives from Alabama andLouisiana might this dispersion bring industry to their areas and awayfrom the Northeast which already had such access to the federal silverspoon Industrialists wondered aloud how much federal force-feedingthere would be and the ofcials reassured them that they intended inno way to damage business interests lower productivity or threaten a lossof labor supply This was to be dispersion within a marketing areamdashnot wholesale relocation to distant states

Small and his colleagues in dispersion left the audience withsomewhat vague injunctions But the national policy did vastly moreit aimed to make citizens of every community into target analysts oftheir own region As the Bureau of Commerce patiently explainedldquomaterials and methods for identifying the potential target areas aredescribed on the following pagesrdquo23 Those ldquopotential target areasrdquo

16 Grey Room 04

were the cities and towns of the United States Here is how the Commerce Department directed every community

but especially the top 168 metropolitan areas to proceed First checkthe list of industrial classifications and identify all those plantsemploying more than one hundred workers per peak shift These ranfrom industrial inorganic chemicals coke and byproducts to steelmills engines aircraft scientific instruments photographic equip-ment and ordnance Then identify those locations on a map (naturallynot disclosing the precise role of any single plant to unwanted eyes)Combine this information with outlines of heavily populated sectionsfollowing the information of the Census Bureau Lay out two largemaps (one inch equals one mile) showing political subdivisions arterialhighways railroads ports and harbors alongside industrial areas Nextdraw a series of four-inch (four-mile) circles on transparent overlaysmdashthese correspond to the area destroyed by an atomic bomb

Now you are ready to identify your regionrsquos target zones ldquothose areasthat contain sufcient concentrations of industry or population so asto constitute attractive atom-bomb targetsrdquo24 Just ldquoattractive atom-bombtargetsrdquo not sites ldquolikely to be targeted by the Russiansrdquomdashthe reifiedshorthand compresses all those years of wartime and then postwar tar-geting Your goal in what follows is to use these circles to form a targetout of the city as a whole by transecting the four-mile-diameter circlesonce they are judiciously located In particular the full target will contain both valuable defense-related industries (employing 16000workers in toto) or a residential population of 200000 people

Here is the schematic procedureThis region outlined by the dark line encloses the ldquohighly indus-

trialized sectionrdquo as defined by the National Industrial DispersionProgram Next each community is to plot the census tracts on the sec-ond set of working maps At the center of each tract goes a dot and thepopulation Again you overlay a four-mile transparent circle movingit until it circles a population of 200000 When you connect the centersof these 200000-person circles you have formed a ldquodensely populatedsectionrdquo Next join the two maps in such a way as to form a combinedarea embracing the high density of regions of both industry and popu-lation This joint region the Commerce Department declared wouldbe known as a potential A-bomb target zone From that zone measureten inches (ten miles) out to form the dispersal limit line There is yourgoal Locate all future critical industry and its associated populationspast the line of safety taking care not to create inadvertently a secondarypotential A-bomb target zone

These maps were not designed just to scare they would form witha factory proposal an application for a ldquocerticate of necessityrdquo (granting

Galison | War against the Center 17

18 Grey Room 04

Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo

Boundary of highly industrial ized section

Census-tract population centers with population gures

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of highly industrialized section

Galison | War against the Center 19

Top row left to right Self-targeting step I Take the listof government designated defense-related industries and plot theirlocation and employment This isthe rst task towards the construc-tion of areas known as the highlyindustrialized sections Source USDepartment of Commerce Indus-trial Dispersion Guidebook forCommunities Domestic CommerceSeries no 31 (Washington DCUS Government Printing Of ce1952)

Self-targeting step II To completethe construction of the perimeterof the highly industrialized sectionsdraw circles of four-mile radiusconnect centers of circles contain-ing more than 16000 workersSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step III Label populations from census tractsSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Bottom row left to right Self-targeting step IV To completethe construction of the denselypopulated sections draw circles offour-mile radius and connect thecenters of circles with more than200000 inhabitants SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Self-targeting step V Now super-impose the highly industrializedarea on the densely populatedarea Taken together they form the potential A-bomb Target zoneSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step VI Drawingthe potential A-bomb target zoneon a regional map planners shouldnow construct a safety margin often miles from the outside of theendangered area All new industrialplants should be dispersed out-side this ten-mile radius SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Census-tract population centers with population gures

accelerated tax amortization) facilitating the approval of defense loansand securing defense contracts

Bombing the Axis economy and dispersing the American one werereflections of one another When Charles E Wilson director of theOffice of Defense Mobilization came before the National SecurityResources Board of the Presidentrsquos Executive Office he needed anexpert on how to disperse industry To the captains of industry assem-bled for a 1951 hearing Wilson sought to justify his strictures aboutsplitting plants by ten or twenty miles ldquoMr Gorrie brought me a realexpert on that I call him a real expert because he was one of the menwho had done bombing in the industrial arena of Germany and cer-tainly he convinced me that 10 or 20 miles provides reasonable safetyrdquo25

Bombers braced for bombsIn 1952 Project East River (Associated Universities contracted to the

federal government) reported on how Washington could drive indus-try outside the expanding urban areas ldquoleapfroggingrdquo away from urbancores One role was to create ldquopublic understandingrdquo of the need forldquosatellite townrdquo planning and its defense use More materially theEast River gang reported the federal government should provide aidto assist in the construction of urban arteries to the satellite towns pro-vide rent subsidies to small businesses send appropriations to matchmetropolitan planning units offer tax assistance for new constructionin outlying areas demand dispersal to qualify for federal defenseinsurance and promote federal loans and grants for the constructionof outlying schools streets water and sewers The government shouldsubsidize ring roads around citiesmdashlike Route 128 around Bostonmdashand strive to locate defense industry on it Above all the fast-increas-ing population ofce building and industry heading into cities had tobe reversed Throughout constant vigilance against the re-creation ofnew centers26

Eponymously the report took as its ldquoarea studyrdquo the imagined caseof a Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapon detonated several thousand feetabove a 260-acre rectangle in Manhattan adjacent to the East RiverWith detailed information about the age structure and flammabilityof individual buildingsmdashand recent census datamdashthis not-so-typicalpiece of America could then be tracked as it shattered and burnedunder the assault of nuclear attack How many of the 35000 peopleresiding between 59th and 72nd Streets (between 3rd Avenue and theriver) would become casualties if a weapon were to be exploded at 2 AM How many minutesrsquo warning would they have to take shelterHow much radiation would they receive Would a firestorm eruptBased principally on the results of the US Strategic Bombing Surveyon Hiroshima and Nagasaki this report was in a sense a dully terrifying

20 Grey Room 04

answer to the question the Bombing Survey had posed seven years earlier What would the bombs that were let loose over Hiroshima havelooked like were they to have been dropped back home27

Under the guidance of these various boards and the lucrative drawof taxes loans and contracts one by one key industrial and civic leaderslearned to see themselves through the reflection of a bombsight Oneby one they began plotting their own dispersion In September 1955for example the Chemical and Engineering News reported on atomicvulnerability in the chemical process industry Nuclear weapons jetairplanes and the concept of total war combined wrote Neil P HurleySJ to blur the distinction between military force and industrial poten-tial The role of an industrymdashits functional interdependence on otherindustriesmdashxed the likelihood of its plants becoming targets Chemical-process industries were vulnerable on two fronts geographic concen-tration and functional criticality The conclusion was as inevitable asit was fearsome ldquoThree well-directed H-bombs on these key targetareas would have serious consequences for the industrial chemicalproducing complexrdquo28 Two-thirds of workers making industrial chem-icals lived in ten states

American chemical dispersion in 1955 was directly and explicitlylinked to German chemical dispersion in 1945 Over and over againHurley cited the Strategic Bombing Survey ldquoIt is worth noting thatantifriction bearings represented an Achilles heel in the German econ-omy in World War II The Strategic Bombing Survey indicated a paral-ysis of German industry following Allied air force bombings ofSchweinfurt where more than 50 of German antifriction bearingswere producedrdquo Four H-bombs for example could wipe out half the UScapacity to produce instruments and related products ldquoUnfortunatelythe US has many Schweinfurts In the Great Lakes region are to befound 47 of the nonelectrical machinery productionrdquo A saturationattack on that regionmdashand saturation would not take many bombsmdashwould Hurley noted destroy a vast array of industries including thatof chemicals29

Throughout the 1950s the Strategic Bombing Survey remained cen-tral to thinking about nuclear warfare and the dispersion of industryHurley for example in constructing his report on American chemicalpriorities reproduced the Surveyrsquos list of the ten most vital chemicalsfor the German war effort from nitrogen methanol and calcium car-bide down to caustic soda chlorine and sodium carbonate He reca-pitulated the Surveyrsquos conclusions about the shortages of nitric acid onthe manufacture of explosives the reduction of methanol that cut intothe making of high explosives and the Germansrsquo vain last-ditch effortsto create underground factories In this new narrative Americans

Galison | War against the Center 21

played the role previously performed by Germans Russians took overthe bombing role from the Allies Those who had used their knowledgeof American industry had planned the strategic bombing of the Axisnow they became the potential bombing victims readying plans to disperse Here is Hurley

To avoid a repetition in this country of the unfortunate experi-ences of the Germans during World War II necessary moves mustbe made before any outbreak of hostilities The Germans enjoyedthe luxury of learning from their mistakes It is highly doubtfulwhether in the atomic age any nation will have the same oppor-tunitymdashone mistake may well be the last30

Dispersal could aid in reconstruction and also preventionmdasha strongernation ldquoprotected in spacerdquo (as the phrase went) would deter any attacker

Admiral Ben Moreell retired from the Navy and in the mid-1950schairman of Jones amp Laughlin Steel Corporation had just presented tothe secretary of commerce the manifesto of the purposes of the Ironand Steel Advisory Council The council had urged a mobilization planfor steel in light of the threat presented by high-speed jet airplaneslong-range missiles and nuclear weapons that ldquoour prospectiveenemyrdquo might at any time hurl without warning Big steel needed acomplete control center one linked by telegraph and radio to the steel-making plants Admiral Moreell and his fellow advisers emphasizedthe proximate danger of Russians with H-bombs and in fact asMoreell noted they had one just a few days after his committee laid itsreport at Commerce Worriedly the admiral allowed that 75 percent ofAmerican steelmaking capacity could be destroyed by a mere tenhydrogen bombs The councilrsquos recommendation disperse 25 percentof the capacity in such a way that the resulting plants would be splitup into numerous single-function plants providing each plant with atleast three alternative modes for transporting its products It was timeMoreell intoned to take similar measures in a host of other industriesincluding rubber copper glass aluminum textiles automobiles andelectrical products Prepare for real costs for steel alone the disper-sion bill would run to some $10 billion

Moreell ldquoPerhaps I have overemphasized the hazard under whichwe now live I do not believe so The facts which are coming out withrespect to the tactics and policies of the Communist enemy in Chinaand Korea added to what we already know about them justify the con-clusion that we are facing a ruthless adversary who will permit nohumane consideration to inuence his decisions who will strike with-out prior warning and whose ambition is to rule the worldrdquo31

Dispersion might help the admiral concluded Like so much of this lit-

22 Grey Room 04

Opposite top Where the steelindustry is concentrated Source Admiral Ben MoreellldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do toUS Industriesrdquo US News andWorld Report 7 May 1954

Opposite bottom Destroyingsteel Source Moreell ldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do to USIndustriesrdquo

erature issues of protability and patriotism stood side by side and heconcluded under the ag gesturing to the Founding Father ldquoIn timeof peace prepare for warrdquo

Preparations advanced In 1956 Industrial Development a nationalmagazine dedicated to ldquoarea analysis and business site selectionrdquoreported that the Ofce of Area Development had reviewed and approvedsome fty-eight of the self-prepared urban area surveys Money talkedBy mid-June 1955 projects valued at $30 billion had qualied for taxabatements under the program

Take Milwaukee In December 1953 the cityrsquos mayor Frank Zeidlertraveled to the White House where the president addressed some twohundred large-city mayors in stark terms ldquoFor the rst time in historycities have become principal targets for an enemy seeking to conquerour nation The city has moved from a position of support in the rear Ithas moved out into the front linerdquo Immediately Zeidler arrangedto meet with the Wisconsin governor and the mayors of RacineMadison and Green Joining the chorus of civil defense authorities themayors agreed that in the short term they would need plans for rapidevacuation in the event of a nuclear attack at the same time theyneeded to begin longer-term planning for the dispersal of the city By

Galison | War against the Center 23

May 1954 Milwaukee had its report ldquoNew building in the core of anurban target [ought to] be prohibited except when it replaces existingstructures This is intended to halt the pouring of greater target valuesinto areas which are already richly rewarding as targetsrdquo Spreadingindustry wasnrsquot all that the report advocated The new region wouldneed new school districts novel tax structures and alternative typesof local governments Zoning would force dispersal from the centerinstitute bands of open space and deliver industrial plants to hinter-lands deliberately bypassed by major radial or circumferential roads inorder to avoid creating secondary concentrations ldquoThere is little doubtrdquothe reportrsquos author reckoned ldquothat some of [these] measures wouldhave to be fought through the Supreme Court before they were acceptedby allrdquo32 Pressed by national codes taxes defense spending andimprecations by the president on down local and federal authoritiescompeted to outdo the other in the rush away from the targeted center

America was not alone in declaring war on the urban center Canadain the midst of a major effort to plan urban growth in 1956 also begandefensive dispersal The Ofce of the Civil Defence Coordinator in col-laboration with the Defence Research Board and McGill Universityprepared a Guide to Urban Dispersal ldquoDispersal is the characteristicof present day urban growthrdquo the authors asserted Satellite towns andvillages made urban regions the right scale on which to re-think pat-terns of communication government and demography ldquoDefence iscritical In modern warfare the initial blow is struck at the civilian pop-ulation to destroy at a stroke the ability to resist The greatest vulnera-bility lies in urban concentrationmdashthe greatest security would beachieved by urban dispersalrdquo That dispersal would follow a survey ofa ring located an H-bomb radius away from the regional center That is

24 Grey Room 04

where the Guide came in Based in part on a real area and in part ongeneric characteristics the book was a how-to manual for planning thescattering of the urban into the regional Slope of the land location ofwater avenues of communication and transport needs all had to bereckoned The Guide instructed local leaders and planners how to dia-gram all this for their future Satellite towns would perch outside thering of safetymdashtowns that under no circumstances ought to attractmore than forty thousand inhabitants Ultimately government-pro-pelled ldquourban regionsrdquo would replace the ldquoamorphous formrdquo of currentmetropolitan development alleviating social and economic problemswhile securing spatial defense against thermonuclear attack33 City bycity country by country the bomb helped drive dispersion Indeedcoming full circle the Germans already all too familiar with aerialbombardment began preparing for a rain of hydrogen bombsHannover Bremen and Duumlsseldorf issued the rst three analyses andothers would follow Their comprehensive treatments covered the sta-tus of police re hospital postal service and road service followinga nuclear attack34

Preparation for atomic war was certainly on President Dwight DEisenhowerrsquos mind as he strove to resuscitate the long-debated federalhighway system Franklin D Roosevelt had pushed the idea in the1930s not least for its promise of providing jobs Reports rolled in TheBureau of Public Roads undertook one in 1938 and the chairman ofthat organization presided over another called Interregional Highwaysdated 1943 Other reports and standards marched on through the warwith some actually leading to road buildingmdashin 1947 crews began cut-ting the rst miles of interstate highways Still by the time Eisenhowercame into office in January 1953 there were but six thousand or somiles of road improvements actually on the ground (at a cost of nearly$1 billion)

Eisenhower liked highways He had struggled across the country ina motorized convoy back in 1919 an unpleasant sixty-two days of slip-ping on ice sticking in mud breaking into wooden bridges and freez-ing under snow The contrast with Germany was stark As SupremeCommander General Eisenhower had been astonished by the auto-bahns taking particular note of the advantages that road system affordedas he had to move masses of men and mateacuteriel across the conqueredReich ldquoGermany made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons acrossthe landrdquo On July 12 1954 Vice President Richard Nixon facing theconference of state governors at Lake George New York read fromEisenhowerrsquos prepared speech and the message was clear The obso-lete network had to go its antiquated byways were clogging the roadsand courts while leaving a death toll on the citizenry comparable to

Galison | War against the Center 25

Industrial dispersal 1956 Solidcircles show cities where dispersalplans were approved by late 1955dotted circles indicate communi-ties where plans were under prepa-ration Source Theodore K PasmaldquoIndustrial Dispersal 1956rdquo Indus-trial Development The NationalMagazine of Area Analysis andBusiness Site Selection (January-February 1956)

ldquoa bloody warrdquo But Eisenhowerrsquos final jab at the current system wasstark holding up for public contemplation its ldquoappalling inadequaciesto meet the demands of catastrophe or defense should an atomic warcomerdquo35 Radial roads would afford clear routes for city evacuationCircumferential roads Project East River had recommended back in1952 should be encouraged wherever possible to drain industry andpopulation from the dense city centers36 In fact highway designersconsulted with federal civil defense agencies and military plannersaimed for interstate highways that would bypass urban areas to avoidldquoroute[s] that had suffered a direct A-bomb hitrdquo37 It took two years ofpolitical wrangling and it goes without saying that economic housingand non-nuclear forces for the interstate were surely among its powerfulmotors By the end of 1956 the Interstate and Defense Highway Systemhad fundingmdashsome $25 billion of federal support38

3 Distributed KnowledgeBy 1960 the Air Force began dreaming worse nightmares than nuke-ladenbombers bullying their way past ghter defense Atomic strikes againstthe continental United States could be launched with missiles forwhich range of ight was no longer an issue The RAND Corporationmade its mark with contracts to think about this thermonuclear threatfrom the new think tank issued shelves of studies including thefamous (and famously parodied) volume by Herman Kahn On Thermo-nuclear War Just as Kahn stepped into the limelight the much lesswell known Paul Baran an electrical engineer coming from HughesAircraft Companyrsquos systems group joined RAND His job was todevelop a scheme that would ensure the survival of the US telecom-munications infrastructure through a Russian rst strikemdasha vital linknot only for domestic communication but also for command and con-trol His response in a series of papers launched in 1960 was a plan toremove completely critical nodes from the telephone system Like thethree highways many wanted from each dispersed defense plantBaranrsquos vision aimed for safety in redundantly connected spatially dis-tributed mini-centers

Here is how Baran put it in one of his rst papers

The cloud-of-doom attitude that nuclear war spells the end of theearth is slowly lifting from the minds of the many Better quanti-tative estimates of post-attack destruction together with a lessemotional discussion of the alternatives may mark the end of theldquowhat the hellmdashwhatrsquos the userdquo era A new view emerges the pos-sibility of a war exists but there is much that can be done to min-imize the consequences

26 Grey Room 04

De nition of redundancy Paul Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunications I Introductionto Distributed CommunicationsNetworkrdquo RAND Corporationmemorandum RM-3420-PRAugust 1964

Survivable atomic warmdashthe goal of the fteen-year struggle since theSurvey crew picked through the still radioactive rubble at HiroshimaBaran again

If war does not mean the end of the earth in a black and whitemanner then it follows that we should do those things that makethe shade of gray as light as possible to plan now to minimizepotential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permitthe survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstructthe economy swiftly39

That reconstruction demanded the elimination of the hierarchical center alternately referred to over these rst decades of the cold war asthe linchpin the bottleneck and the node

The problem as Baran formulated it did involve new equipment tolabel digitally each packet of information with a ldquotordquo and ldquofromrdquo andthen to route these fragments over diverse paths toward their eventualreassembly on arrival But before anything could be built moved dig-itized or reinforced the conceptual problem required attention Thatreconceptualization now took as it had not before a mathematicalform If nodes were replaced with redundant links how could heexploit the information-theoretic approach of Claude Shannon to countthe surviving paths between points in the array

Here is how Baran reasoned

Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network whichwill allow several hundred major communications stations to talkwith one another after an enemy attack As a criterion of surviv-ability we elect to use the percentage of stations both survivingthe physical attack and remaining in electrical connection withthe largest single group of surviving stations This criterion ischosen as a conservative measure of the ability of the survivingstations to operate together as a coherent entity after the attack40

With the result that a redundancy of at least R = 3would ensure a likely survival rate of nearly 75 percentBaran could now sketch the distributed system thatwould vouchsafe communication after nuclear war

Worst obviously was the centralized node that rep-resented the single critical target This was the situationwith concentrated steel electricity or oil plants it wasthe structure of the hubbed railway system It was inshort the bombing plannerrsquos dream and the bombingvictimrsquos nightmare Decentralized nodes that main-tained a local hierarchical structure were clearly better

Galison | War against the Center 27

a complete grid structure was best of all To a certain extent such gridsstood for the defensive ideal of dispersion more generally By increasingthe number of targets one decreased the likelihood of incapacitationHalting abortive and awkward though it was Baranrsquos scheme (alongwith a similar one developed in England) slowly wended its way throughdifferent incarnations in the ARPANET and Milnet But the elusivegoal all through these decades of distributed communication was a dis-tributed grid or mesh a thrust in the rst instance aimed at removingthe critical node Though in the garb of nuclear survivability the gridmay not appear as the redemptive Internet of our dreams that tech-nology grew directly out of fifteen years of longing for a world stillstanding after thermonuclear war41

4 We Are Become TargetsDuring the years of World War II American and British planners andanalysts learned to see through a bombsight Not in a single glimpsebut in the routine killings and losses that accompanied ever more fre-quently repeated raids Twenty-four hours a day day after day monthafter month year after year the planners and analysts studied andrestudied the interdependencies of the German economy circled tar-gets blasted factories leveled cities analyzed the damage and struckagain Chemicals nitric acid methanol Basic materials rubber steeloil aviation gas Transport systems electrical generators And popula-tion centers area bombing by the combined American and Britishforces killed some 600000 Germans In a war that the Nazis renderedever more vicious even as their defeat seemed inevitable the Americansrsquoearly dreams of precision bombing went by the way Two hundredplanes over Schweinfurt then four hundred but also Hamburg LuumlbeckMuumlnster Berlin Dresden Regensburg year after year Measuring bombloads accuracies reconstruction time 35 ton of bombs per acre toinduce damage of 8 percent delay time for reconstruction two and a

28 Grey Room 04

half months A calculus of fractions probabilities delaysBy the warrsquos end a new category of analyst had come into existence

more often than not social scientists and industrialists but also human-ists diplomats mathematicians and natural scientists Piecing togetherfragments of intelligence examining reconnaissance photographs theypainted an elaborate portrait of a wartime foe By warrsquos end the Surveyanalysts had come to see German and Japanese cities through what onemight call a ldquodestructive functionalismrdquo dependencies leading back-ward they kept hoping to the ever-elusive linchpin that when pulledwould topple the structure Schweinfurt was supposed to be one suchpoint with its all-important bearing factories And after Schweinfurtthere were other ldquobottlenecksrdquo to be targeted other cities other plantsother transshipment points

Perhaps before Hiroshima the bombsight eye had already begun toreect back I donrsquot know But in the atomic rubble as the analysts inter-viewed hundreds of blast survivors and canvassed the broken struc-tures as they methodically noted which kinds of concrete walls stillstood at various radii of destruction they began quite explicitly to seethemselves to see America through the bombardierrsquos eye They beganto wonder what an American city would look like after the bomb hadfallen Returning to the United States and publishing their StrategicBombing Survey things began to look different They began to see them-selves their towns and factories on the crosshairs of radial targetingmaps Far from a technological determinism the all-too material tech-nologies and concepts of self were fully imbricated

One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics launched when NorbertWiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedbackmachine that could be mimicked electronically from there it was a shortstep to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way Then humanphysiology began to appear as a cybernetic system then the humanmind then life then even the world system as a whole42 Somewherein the midst of total war a technocratic vision of a technical EnemyOther rose to become a vision of ourselves It was but a heartbeat beforecybernetics saturated the writings of Gregory Bateson and MargaretMead not to speak of philosophers planners and architects

But the consequence was this Three years before the Russians hadthe bomb in fact before on just about anyonersquos account the cold warhad begun American analysts were already advocating a massive dis-persion of factories and populations against atomic aerial attack

As the cold war arms race accelerated the search for ldquodefense in spacerdquogrew more desperate jet bombers atomic bombs hydrogen bombsintercontinental ballistic missiles With each step more frantic urgingto spread the cities into their ldquomarketing areasrdquo Highway systems

Galison | War against the Center 29

Centralized decentralized and distributed networksSource Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

were the cities and towns of the United States Here is how the Commerce Department directed every community

but especially the top 168 metropolitan areas to proceed First checkthe list of industrial classifications and identify all those plantsemploying more than one hundred workers per peak shift These ranfrom industrial inorganic chemicals coke and byproducts to steelmills engines aircraft scientific instruments photographic equip-ment and ordnance Then identify those locations on a map (naturallynot disclosing the precise role of any single plant to unwanted eyes)Combine this information with outlines of heavily populated sectionsfollowing the information of the Census Bureau Lay out two largemaps (one inch equals one mile) showing political subdivisions arterialhighways railroads ports and harbors alongside industrial areas Nextdraw a series of four-inch (four-mile) circles on transparent overlaysmdashthese correspond to the area destroyed by an atomic bomb

Now you are ready to identify your regionrsquos target zones ldquothose areasthat contain sufcient concentrations of industry or population so asto constitute attractive atom-bomb targetsrdquo24 Just ldquoattractive atom-bombtargetsrdquo not sites ldquolikely to be targeted by the Russiansrdquomdashthe reifiedshorthand compresses all those years of wartime and then postwar tar-geting Your goal in what follows is to use these circles to form a targetout of the city as a whole by transecting the four-mile-diameter circlesonce they are judiciously located In particular the full target will contain both valuable defense-related industries (employing 16000workers in toto) or a residential population of 200000 people

Here is the schematic procedureThis region outlined by the dark line encloses the ldquohighly indus-

trialized sectionrdquo as defined by the National Industrial DispersionProgram Next each community is to plot the census tracts on the sec-ond set of working maps At the center of each tract goes a dot and thepopulation Again you overlay a four-mile transparent circle movingit until it circles a population of 200000 When you connect the centersof these 200000-person circles you have formed a ldquodensely populatedsectionrdquo Next join the two maps in such a way as to form a combinedarea embracing the high density of regions of both industry and popu-lation This joint region the Commerce Department declared wouldbe known as a potential A-bomb target zone From that zone measureten inches (ten miles) out to form the dispersal limit line There is yourgoal Locate all future critical industry and its associated populationspast the line of safety taking care not to create inadvertently a secondarypotential A-bomb target zone

These maps were not designed just to scare they would form witha factory proposal an application for a ldquocerticate of necessityrdquo (granting

Galison | War against the Center 17

18 Grey Room 04

Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo

Boundary of highly industrial ized section

Census-tract population centers with population gures

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of highly industrialized section

Galison | War against the Center 19

Top row left to right Self-targeting step I Take the listof government designated defense-related industries and plot theirlocation and employment This isthe rst task towards the construc-tion of areas known as the highlyindustrialized sections Source USDepartment of Commerce Indus-trial Dispersion Guidebook forCommunities Domestic CommerceSeries no 31 (Washington DCUS Government Printing Of ce1952)

Self-targeting step II To completethe construction of the perimeterof the highly industrialized sectionsdraw circles of four-mile radiusconnect centers of circles contain-ing more than 16000 workersSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step III Label populations from census tractsSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Bottom row left to right Self-targeting step IV To completethe construction of the denselypopulated sections draw circles offour-mile radius and connect thecenters of circles with more than200000 inhabitants SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Self-targeting step V Now super-impose the highly industrializedarea on the densely populatedarea Taken together they form the potential A-bomb Target zoneSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step VI Drawingthe potential A-bomb target zoneon a regional map planners shouldnow construct a safety margin often miles from the outside of theendangered area All new industrialplants should be dispersed out-side this ten-mile radius SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Census-tract population centers with population gures

accelerated tax amortization) facilitating the approval of defense loansand securing defense contracts

Bombing the Axis economy and dispersing the American one werereflections of one another When Charles E Wilson director of theOffice of Defense Mobilization came before the National SecurityResources Board of the Presidentrsquos Executive Office he needed anexpert on how to disperse industry To the captains of industry assem-bled for a 1951 hearing Wilson sought to justify his strictures aboutsplitting plants by ten or twenty miles ldquoMr Gorrie brought me a realexpert on that I call him a real expert because he was one of the menwho had done bombing in the industrial arena of Germany and cer-tainly he convinced me that 10 or 20 miles provides reasonable safetyrdquo25

Bombers braced for bombsIn 1952 Project East River (Associated Universities contracted to the

federal government) reported on how Washington could drive indus-try outside the expanding urban areas ldquoleapfroggingrdquo away from urbancores One role was to create ldquopublic understandingrdquo of the need forldquosatellite townrdquo planning and its defense use More materially theEast River gang reported the federal government should provide aidto assist in the construction of urban arteries to the satellite towns pro-vide rent subsidies to small businesses send appropriations to matchmetropolitan planning units offer tax assistance for new constructionin outlying areas demand dispersal to qualify for federal defenseinsurance and promote federal loans and grants for the constructionof outlying schools streets water and sewers The government shouldsubsidize ring roads around citiesmdashlike Route 128 around Bostonmdashand strive to locate defense industry on it Above all the fast-increas-ing population ofce building and industry heading into cities had tobe reversed Throughout constant vigilance against the re-creation ofnew centers26

Eponymously the report took as its ldquoarea studyrdquo the imagined caseof a Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapon detonated several thousand feetabove a 260-acre rectangle in Manhattan adjacent to the East RiverWith detailed information about the age structure and flammabilityof individual buildingsmdashand recent census datamdashthis not-so-typicalpiece of America could then be tracked as it shattered and burnedunder the assault of nuclear attack How many of the 35000 peopleresiding between 59th and 72nd Streets (between 3rd Avenue and theriver) would become casualties if a weapon were to be exploded at 2 AM How many minutesrsquo warning would they have to take shelterHow much radiation would they receive Would a firestorm eruptBased principally on the results of the US Strategic Bombing Surveyon Hiroshima and Nagasaki this report was in a sense a dully terrifying

20 Grey Room 04

answer to the question the Bombing Survey had posed seven years earlier What would the bombs that were let loose over Hiroshima havelooked like were they to have been dropped back home27

Under the guidance of these various boards and the lucrative drawof taxes loans and contracts one by one key industrial and civic leaderslearned to see themselves through the reflection of a bombsight Oneby one they began plotting their own dispersion In September 1955for example the Chemical and Engineering News reported on atomicvulnerability in the chemical process industry Nuclear weapons jetairplanes and the concept of total war combined wrote Neil P HurleySJ to blur the distinction between military force and industrial poten-tial The role of an industrymdashits functional interdependence on otherindustriesmdashxed the likelihood of its plants becoming targets Chemical-process industries were vulnerable on two fronts geographic concen-tration and functional criticality The conclusion was as inevitable asit was fearsome ldquoThree well-directed H-bombs on these key targetareas would have serious consequences for the industrial chemicalproducing complexrdquo28 Two-thirds of workers making industrial chem-icals lived in ten states

American chemical dispersion in 1955 was directly and explicitlylinked to German chemical dispersion in 1945 Over and over againHurley cited the Strategic Bombing Survey ldquoIt is worth noting thatantifriction bearings represented an Achilles heel in the German econ-omy in World War II The Strategic Bombing Survey indicated a paral-ysis of German industry following Allied air force bombings ofSchweinfurt where more than 50 of German antifriction bearingswere producedrdquo Four H-bombs for example could wipe out half the UScapacity to produce instruments and related products ldquoUnfortunatelythe US has many Schweinfurts In the Great Lakes region are to befound 47 of the nonelectrical machinery productionrdquo A saturationattack on that regionmdashand saturation would not take many bombsmdashwould Hurley noted destroy a vast array of industries including thatof chemicals29

Throughout the 1950s the Strategic Bombing Survey remained cen-tral to thinking about nuclear warfare and the dispersion of industryHurley for example in constructing his report on American chemicalpriorities reproduced the Surveyrsquos list of the ten most vital chemicalsfor the German war effort from nitrogen methanol and calcium car-bide down to caustic soda chlorine and sodium carbonate He reca-pitulated the Surveyrsquos conclusions about the shortages of nitric acid onthe manufacture of explosives the reduction of methanol that cut intothe making of high explosives and the Germansrsquo vain last-ditch effortsto create underground factories In this new narrative Americans

Galison | War against the Center 21

played the role previously performed by Germans Russians took overthe bombing role from the Allies Those who had used their knowledgeof American industry had planned the strategic bombing of the Axisnow they became the potential bombing victims readying plans to disperse Here is Hurley

To avoid a repetition in this country of the unfortunate experi-ences of the Germans during World War II necessary moves mustbe made before any outbreak of hostilities The Germans enjoyedthe luxury of learning from their mistakes It is highly doubtfulwhether in the atomic age any nation will have the same oppor-tunitymdashone mistake may well be the last30

Dispersal could aid in reconstruction and also preventionmdasha strongernation ldquoprotected in spacerdquo (as the phrase went) would deter any attacker

Admiral Ben Moreell retired from the Navy and in the mid-1950schairman of Jones amp Laughlin Steel Corporation had just presented tothe secretary of commerce the manifesto of the purposes of the Ironand Steel Advisory Council The council had urged a mobilization planfor steel in light of the threat presented by high-speed jet airplaneslong-range missiles and nuclear weapons that ldquoour prospectiveenemyrdquo might at any time hurl without warning Big steel needed acomplete control center one linked by telegraph and radio to the steel-making plants Admiral Moreell and his fellow advisers emphasizedthe proximate danger of Russians with H-bombs and in fact asMoreell noted they had one just a few days after his committee laid itsreport at Commerce Worriedly the admiral allowed that 75 percent ofAmerican steelmaking capacity could be destroyed by a mere tenhydrogen bombs The councilrsquos recommendation disperse 25 percentof the capacity in such a way that the resulting plants would be splitup into numerous single-function plants providing each plant with atleast three alternative modes for transporting its products It was timeMoreell intoned to take similar measures in a host of other industriesincluding rubber copper glass aluminum textiles automobiles andelectrical products Prepare for real costs for steel alone the disper-sion bill would run to some $10 billion

Moreell ldquoPerhaps I have overemphasized the hazard under whichwe now live I do not believe so The facts which are coming out withrespect to the tactics and policies of the Communist enemy in Chinaand Korea added to what we already know about them justify the con-clusion that we are facing a ruthless adversary who will permit nohumane consideration to inuence his decisions who will strike with-out prior warning and whose ambition is to rule the worldrdquo31

Dispersion might help the admiral concluded Like so much of this lit-

22 Grey Room 04

Opposite top Where the steelindustry is concentrated Source Admiral Ben MoreellldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do toUS Industriesrdquo US News andWorld Report 7 May 1954

Opposite bottom Destroyingsteel Source Moreell ldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do to USIndustriesrdquo

erature issues of protability and patriotism stood side by side and heconcluded under the ag gesturing to the Founding Father ldquoIn timeof peace prepare for warrdquo

Preparations advanced In 1956 Industrial Development a nationalmagazine dedicated to ldquoarea analysis and business site selectionrdquoreported that the Ofce of Area Development had reviewed and approvedsome fty-eight of the self-prepared urban area surveys Money talkedBy mid-June 1955 projects valued at $30 billion had qualied for taxabatements under the program

Take Milwaukee In December 1953 the cityrsquos mayor Frank Zeidlertraveled to the White House where the president addressed some twohundred large-city mayors in stark terms ldquoFor the rst time in historycities have become principal targets for an enemy seeking to conquerour nation The city has moved from a position of support in the rear Ithas moved out into the front linerdquo Immediately Zeidler arrangedto meet with the Wisconsin governor and the mayors of RacineMadison and Green Joining the chorus of civil defense authorities themayors agreed that in the short term they would need plans for rapidevacuation in the event of a nuclear attack at the same time theyneeded to begin longer-term planning for the dispersal of the city By

Galison | War against the Center 23

May 1954 Milwaukee had its report ldquoNew building in the core of anurban target [ought to] be prohibited except when it replaces existingstructures This is intended to halt the pouring of greater target valuesinto areas which are already richly rewarding as targetsrdquo Spreadingindustry wasnrsquot all that the report advocated The new region wouldneed new school districts novel tax structures and alternative typesof local governments Zoning would force dispersal from the centerinstitute bands of open space and deliver industrial plants to hinter-lands deliberately bypassed by major radial or circumferential roads inorder to avoid creating secondary concentrations ldquoThere is little doubtrdquothe reportrsquos author reckoned ldquothat some of [these] measures wouldhave to be fought through the Supreme Court before they were acceptedby allrdquo32 Pressed by national codes taxes defense spending andimprecations by the president on down local and federal authoritiescompeted to outdo the other in the rush away from the targeted center

America was not alone in declaring war on the urban center Canadain the midst of a major effort to plan urban growth in 1956 also begandefensive dispersal The Ofce of the Civil Defence Coordinator in col-laboration with the Defence Research Board and McGill Universityprepared a Guide to Urban Dispersal ldquoDispersal is the characteristicof present day urban growthrdquo the authors asserted Satellite towns andvillages made urban regions the right scale on which to re-think pat-terns of communication government and demography ldquoDefence iscritical In modern warfare the initial blow is struck at the civilian pop-ulation to destroy at a stroke the ability to resist The greatest vulnera-bility lies in urban concentrationmdashthe greatest security would beachieved by urban dispersalrdquo That dispersal would follow a survey ofa ring located an H-bomb radius away from the regional center That is

24 Grey Room 04

where the Guide came in Based in part on a real area and in part ongeneric characteristics the book was a how-to manual for planning thescattering of the urban into the regional Slope of the land location ofwater avenues of communication and transport needs all had to bereckoned The Guide instructed local leaders and planners how to dia-gram all this for their future Satellite towns would perch outside thering of safetymdashtowns that under no circumstances ought to attractmore than forty thousand inhabitants Ultimately government-pro-pelled ldquourban regionsrdquo would replace the ldquoamorphous formrdquo of currentmetropolitan development alleviating social and economic problemswhile securing spatial defense against thermonuclear attack33 City bycity country by country the bomb helped drive dispersion Indeedcoming full circle the Germans already all too familiar with aerialbombardment began preparing for a rain of hydrogen bombsHannover Bremen and Duumlsseldorf issued the rst three analyses andothers would follow Their comprehensive treatments covered the sta-tus of police re hospital postal service and road service followinga nuclear attack34

Preparation for atomic war was certainly on President Dwight DEisenhowerrsquos mind as he strove to resuscitate the long-debated federalhighway system Franklin D Roosevelt had pushed the idea in the1930s not least for its promise of providing jobs Reports rolled in TheBureau of Public Roads undertook one in 1938 and the chairman ofthat organization presided over another called Interregional Highwaysdated 1943 Other reports and standards marched on through the warwith some actually leading to road buildingmdashin 1947 crews began cut-ting the rst miles of interstate highways Still by the time Eisenhowercame into office in January 1953 there were but six thousand or somiles of road improvements actually on the ground (at a cost of nearly$1 billion)

Eisenhower liked highways He had struggled across the country ina motorized convoy back in 1919 an unpleasant sixty-two days of slip-ping on ice sticking in mud breaking into wooden bridges and freez-ing under snow The contrast with Germany was stark As SupremeCommander General Eisenhower had been astonished by the auto-bahns taking particular note of the advantages that road system affordedas he had to move masses of men and mateacuteriel across the conqueredReich ldquoGermany made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons acrossthe landrdquo On July 12 1954 Vice President Richard Nixon facing theconference of state governors at Lake George New York read fromEisenhowerrsquos prepared speech and the message was clear The obso-lete network had to go its antiquated byways were clogging the roadsand courts while leaving a death toll on the citizenry comparable to

Galison | War against the Center 25

Industrial dispersal 1956 Solidcircles show cities where dispersalplans were approved by late 1955dotted circles indicate communi-ties where plans were under prepa-ration Source Theodore K PasmaldquoIndustrial Dispersal 1956rdquo Indus-trial Development The NationalMagazine of Area Analysis andBusiness Site Selection (January-February 1956)

ldquoa bloody warrdquo But Eisenhowerrsquos final jab at the current system wasstark holding up for public contemplation its ldquoappalling inadequaciesto meet the demands of catastrophe or defense should an atomic warcomerdquo35 Radial roads would afford clear routes for city evacuationCircumferential roads Project East River had recommended back in1952 should be encouraged wherever possible to drain industry andpopulation from the dense city centers36 In fact highway designersconsulted with federal civil defense agencies and military plannersaimed for interstate highways that would bypass urban areas to avoidldquoroute[s] that had suffered a direct A-bomb hitrdquo37 It took two years ofpolitical wrangling and it goes without saying that economic housingand non-nuclear forces for the interstate were surely among its powerfulmotors By the end of 1956 the Interstate and Defense Highway Systemhad fundingmdashsome $25 billion of federal support38

3 Distributed KnowledgeBy 1960 the Air Force began dreaming worse nightmares than nuke-ladenbombers bullying their way past ghter defense Atomic strikes againstthe continental United States could be launched with missiles forwhich range of ight was no longer an issue The RAND Corporationmade its mark with contracts to think about this thermonuclear threatfrom the new think tank issued shelves of studies including thefamous (and famously parodied) volume by Herman Kahn On Thermo-nuclear War Just as Kahn stepped into the limelight the much lesswell known Paul Baran an electrical engineer coming from HughesAircraft Companyrsquos systems group joined RAND His job was todevelop a scheme that would ensure the survival of the US telecom-munications infrastructure through a Russian rst strikemdasha vital linknot only for domestic communication but also for command and con-trol His response in a series of papers launched in 1960 was a plan toremove completely critical nodes from the telephone system Like thethree highways many wanted from each dispersed defense plantBaranrsquos vision aimed for safety in redundantly connected spatially dis-tributed mini-centers

Here is how Baran put it in one of his rst papers

The cloud-of-doom attitude that nuclear war spells the end of theearth is slowly lifting from the minds of the many Better quanti-tative estimates of post-attack destruction together with a lessemotional discussion of the alternatives may mark the end of theldquowhat the hellmdashwhatrsquos the userdquo era A new view emerges the pos-sibility of a war exists but there is much that can be done to min-imize the consequences

26 Grey Room 04

De nition of redundancy Paul Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunications I Introductionto Distributed CommunicationsNetworkrdquo RAND Corporationmemorandum RM-3420-PRAugust 1964

Survivable atomic warmdashthe goal of the fteen-year struggle since theSurvey crew picked through the still radioactive rubble at HiroshimaBaran again

If war does not mean the end of the earth in a black and whitemanner then it follows that we should do those things that makethe shade of gray as light as possible to plan now to minimizepotential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permitthe survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstructthe economy swiftly39

That reconstruction demanded the elimination of the hierarchical center alternately referred to over these rst decades of the cold war asthe linchpin the bottleneck and the node

The problem as Baran formulated it did involve new equipment tolabel digitally each packet of information with a ldquotordquo and ldquofromrdquo andthen to route these fragments over diverse paths toward their eventualreassembly on arrival But before anything could be built moved dig-itized or reinforced the conceptual problem required attention Thatreconceptualization now took as it had not before a mathematicalform If nodes were replaced with redundant links how could heexploit the information-theoretic approach of Claude Shannon to countthe surviving paths between points in the array

Here is how Baran reasoned

Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network whichwill allow several hundred major communications stations to talkwith one another after an enemy attack As a criterion of surviv-ability we elect to use the percentage of stations both survivingthe physical attack and remaining in electrical connection withthe largest single group of surviving stations This criterion ischosen as a conservative measure of the ability of the survivingstations to operate together as a coherent entity after the attack40

With the result that a redundancy of at least R = 3would ensure a likely survival rate of nearly 75 percentBaran could now sketch the distributed system thatwould vouchsafe communication after nuclear war

Worst obviously was the centralized node that rep-resented the single critical target This was the situationwith concentrated steel electricity or oil plants it wasthe structure of the hubbed railway system It was inshort the bombing plannerrsquos dream and the bombingvictimrsquos nightmare Decentralized nodes that main-tained a local hierarchical structure were clearly better

Galison | War against the Center 27

a complete grid structure was best of all To a certain extent such gridsstood for the defensive ideal of dispersion more generally By increasingthe number of targets one decreased the likelihood of incapacitationHalting abortive and awkward though it was Baranrsquos scheme (alongwith a similar one developed in England) slowly wended its way throughdifferent incarnations in the ARPANET and Milnet But the elusivegoal all through these decades of distributed communication was a dis-tributed grid or mesh a thrust in the rst instance aimed at removingthe critical node Though in the garb of nuclear survivability the gridmay not appear as the redemptive Internet of our dreams that tech-nology grew directly out of fifteen years of longing for a world stillstanding after thermonuclear war41

4 We Are Become TargetsDuring the years of World War II American and British planners andanalysts learned to see through a bombsight Not in a single glimpsebut in the routine killings and losses that accompanied ever more fre-quently repeated raids Twenty-four hours a day day after day monthafter month year after year the planners and analysts studied andrestudied the interdependencies of the German economy circled tar-gets blasted factories leveled cities analyzed the damage and struckagain Chemicals nitric acid methanol Basic materials rubber steeloil aviation gas Transport systems electrical generators And popula-tion centers area bombing by the combined American and Britishforces killed some 600000 Germans In a war that the Nazis renderedever more vicious even as their defeat seemed inevitable the Americansrsquoearly dreams of precision bombing went by the way Two hundredplanes over Schweinfurt then four hundred but also Hamburg LuumlbeckMuumlnster Berlin Dresden Regensburg year after year Measuring bombloads accuracies reconstruction time 35 ton of bombs per acre toinduce damage of 8 percent delay time for reconstruction two and a

28 Grey Room 04

half months A calculus of fractions probabilities delaysBy the warrsquos end a new category of analyst had come into existence

more often than not social scientists and industrialists but also human-ists diplomats mathematicians and natural scientists Piecing togetherfragments of intelligence examining reconnaissance photographs theypainted an elaborate portrait of a wartime foe By warrsquos end the Surveyanalysts had come to see German and Japanese cities through what onemight call a ldquodestructive functionalismrdquo dependencies leading back-ward they kept hoping to the ever-elusive linchpin that when pulledwould topple the structure Schweinfurt was supposed to be one suchpoint with its all-important bearing factories And after Schweinfurtthere were other ldquobottlenecksrdquo to be targeted other cities other plantsother transshipment points

Perhaps before Hiroshima the bombsight eye had already begun toreect back I donrsquot know But in the atomic rubble as the analysts inter-viewed hundreds of blast survivors and canvassed the broken struc-tures as they methodically noted which kinds of concrete walls stillstood at various radii of destruction they began quite explicitly to seethemselves to see America through the bombardierrsquos eye They beganto wonder what an American city would look like after the bomb hadfallen Returning to the United States and publishing their StrategicBombing Survey things began to look different They began to see them-selves their towns and factories on the crosshairs of radial targetingmaps Far from a technological determinism the all-too material tech-nologies and concepts of self were fully imbricated

One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics launched when NorbertWiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedbackmachine that could be mimicked electronically from there it was a shortstep to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way Then humanphysiology began to appear as a cybernetic system then the humanmind then life then even the world system as a whole42 Somewherein the midst of total war a technocratic vision of a technical EnemyOther rose to become a vision of ourselves It was but a heartbeat beforecybernetics saturated the writings of Gregory Bateson and MargaretMead not to speak of philosophers planners and architects

But the consequence was this Three years before the Russians hadthe bomb in fact before on just about anyonersquos account the cold warhad begun American analysts were already advocating a massive dis-persion of factories and populations against atomic aerial attack

As the cold war arms race accelerated the search for ldquodefense in spacerdquogrew more desperate jet bombers atomic bombs hydrogen bombsintercontinental ballistic missiles With each step more frantic urgingto spread the cities into their ldquomarketing areasrdquo Highway systems

Galison | War against the Center 29

Centralized decentralized and distributed networksSource Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

18 Grey Room 04

Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo Defense-supporting plants with ldquoequivalent employmentrdquo

Boundary of highly industrial ized section

Census-tract population centers with population gures

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of densely populated section

Boundary of highly industrialized section

Galison | War against the Center 19

Top row left to right Self-targeting step I Take the listof government designated defense-related industries and plot theirlocation and employment This isthe rst task towards the construc-tion of areas known as the highlyindustrialized sections Source USDepartment of Commerce Indus-trial Dispersion Guidebook forCommunities Domestic CommerceSeries no 31 (Washington DCUS Government Printing Of ce1952)

Self-targeting step II To completethe construction of the perimeterof the highly industrialized sectionsdraw circles of four-mile radiusconnect centers of circles contain-ing more than 16000 workersSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step III Label populations from census tractsSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Bottom row left to right Self-targeting step IV To completethe construction of the denselypopulated sections draw circles offour-mile radius and connect thecenters of circles with more than200000 inhabitants SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Self-targeting step V Now super-impose the highly industrializedarea on the densely populatedarea Taken together they form the potential A-bomb Target zoneSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step VI Drawingthe potential A-bomb target zoneon a regional map planners shouldnow construct a safety margin often miles from the outside of theendangered area All new industrialplants should be dispersed out-side this ten-mile radius SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Census-tract population centers with population gures

accelerated tax amortization) facilitating the approval of defense loansand securing defense contracts

Bombing the Axis economy and dispersing the American one werereflections of one another When Charles E Wilson director of theOffice of Defense Mobilization came before the National SecurityResources Board of the Presidentrsquos Executive Office he needed anexpert on how to disperse industry To the captains of industry assem-bled for a 1951 hearing Wilson sought to justify his strictures aboutsplitting plants by ten or twenty miles ldquoMr Gorrie brought me a realexpert on that I call him a real expert because he was one of the menwho had done bombing in the industrial arena of Germany and cer-tainly he convinced me that 10 or 20 miles provides reasonable safetyrdquo25

Bombers braced for bombsIn 1952 Project East River (Associated Universities contracted to the

federal government) reported on how Washington could drive indus-try outside the expanding urban areas ldquoleapfroggingrdquo away from urbancores One role was to create ldquopublic understandingrdquo of the need forldquosatellite townrdquo planning and its defense use More materially theEast River gang reported the federal government should provide aidto assist in the construction of urban arteries to the satellite towns pro-vide rent subsidies to small businesses send appropriations to matchmetropolitan planning units offer tax assistance for new constructionin outlying areas demand dispersal to qualify for federal defenseinsurance and promote federal loans and grants for the constructionof outlying schools streets water and sewers The government shouldsubsidize ring roads around citiesmdashlike Route 128 around Bostonmdashand strive to locate defense industry on it Above all the fast-increas-ing population ofce building and industry heading into cities had tobe reversed Throughout constant vigilance against the re-creation ofnew centers26

Eponymously the report took as its ldquoarea studyrdquo the imagined caseof a Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapon detonated several thousand feetabove a 260-acre rectangle in Manhattan adjacent to the East RiverWith detailed information about the age structure and flammabilityof individual buildingsmdashand recent census datamdashthis not-so-typicalpiece of America could then be tracked as it shattered and burnedunder the assault of nuclear attack How many of the 35000 peopleresiding between 59th and 72nd Streets (between 3rd Avenue and theriver) would become casualties if a weapon were to be exploded at 2 AM How many minutesrsquo warning would they have to take shelterHow much radiation would they receive Would a firestorm eruptBased principally on the results of the US Strategic Bombing Surveyon Hiroshima and Nagasaki this report was in a sense a dully terrifying

20 Grey Room 04

answer to the question the Bombing Survey had posed seven years earlier What would the bombs that were let loose over Hiroshima havelooked like were they to have been dropped back home27

Under the guidance of these various boards and the lucrative drawof taxes loans and contracts one by one key industrial and civic leaderslearned to see themselves through the reflection of a bombsight Oneby one they began plotting their own dispersion In September 1955for example the Chemical and Engineering News reported on atomicvulnerability in the chemical process industry Nuclear weapons jetairplanes and the concept of total war combined wrote Neil P HurleySJ to blur the distinction between military force and industrial poten-tial The role of an industrymdashits functional interdependence on otherindustriesmdashxed the likelihood of its plants becoming targets Chemical-process industries were vulnerable on two fronts geographic concen-tration and functional criticality The conclusion was as inevitable asit was fearsome ldquoThree well-directed H-bombs on these key targetareas would have serious consequences for the industrial chemicalproducing complexrdquo28 Two-thirds of workers making industrial chem-icals lived in ten states

American chemical dispersion in 1955 was directly and explicitlylinked to German chemical dispersion in 1945 Over and over againHurley cited the Strategic Bombing Survey ldquoIt is worth noting thatantifriction bearings represented an Achilles heel in the German econ-omy in World War II The Strategic Bombing Survey indicated a paral-ysis of German industry following Allied air force bombings ofSchweinfurt where more than 50 of German antifriction bearingswere producedrdquo Four H-bombs for example could wipe out half the UScapacity to produce instruments and related products ldquoUnfortunatelythe US has many Schweinfurts In the Great Lakes region are to befound 47 of the nonelectrical machinery productionrdquo A saturationattack on that regionmdashand saturation would not take many bombsmdashwould Hurley noted destroy a vast array of industries including thatof chemicals29

Throughout the 1950s the Strategic Bombing Survey remained cen-tral to thinking about nuclear warfare and the dispersion of industryHurley for example in constructing his report on American chemicalpriorities reproduced the Surveyrsquos list of the ten most vital chemicalsfor the German war effort from nitrogen methanol and calcium car-bide down to caustic soda chlorine and sodium carbonate He reca-pitulated the Surveyrsquos conclusions about the shortages of nitric acid onthe manufacture of explosives the reduction of methanol that cut intothe making of high explosives and the Germansrsquo vain last-ditch effortsto create underground factories In this new narrative Americans

Galison | War against the Center 21

played the role previously performed by Germans Russians took overthe bombing role from the Allies Those who had used their knowledgeof American industry had planned the strategic bombing of the Axisnow they became the potential bombing victims readying plans to disperse Here is Hurley

To avoid a repetition in this country of the unfortunate experi-ences of the Germans during World War II necessary moves mustbe made before any outbreak of hostilities The Germans enjoyedthe luxury of learning from their mistakes It is highly doubtfulwhether in the atomic age any nation will have the same oppor-tunitymdashone mistake may well be the last30

Dispersal could aid in reconstruction and also preventionmdasha strongernation ldquoprotected in spacerdquo (as the phrase went) would deter any attacker

Admiral Ben Moreell retired from the Navy and in the mid-1950schairman of Jones amp Laughlin Steel Corporation had just presented tothe secretary of commerce the manifesto of the purposes of the Ironand Steel Advisory Council The council had urged a mobilization planfor steel in light of the threat presented by high-speed jet airplaneslong-range missiles and nuclear weapons that ldquoour prospectiveenemyrdquo might at any time hurl without warning Big steel needed acomplete control center one linked by telegraph and radio to the steel-making plants Admiral Moreell and his fellow advisers emphasizedthe proximate danger of Russians with H-bombs and in fact asMoreell noted they had one just a few days after his committee laid itsreport at Commerce Worriedly the admiral allowed that 75 percent ofAmerican steelmaking capacity could be destroyed by a mere tenhydrogen bombs The councilrsquos recommendation disperse 25 percentof the capacity in such a way that the resulting plants would be splitup into numerous single-function plants providing each plant with atleast three alternative modes for transporting its products It was timeMoreell intoned to take similar measures in a host of other industriesincluding rubber copper glass aluminum textiles automobiles andelectrical products Prepare for real costs for steel alone the disper-sion bill would run to some $10 billion

Moreell ldquoPerhaps I have overemphasized the hazard under whichwe now live I do not believe so The facts which are coming out withrespect to the tactics and policies of the Communist enemy in Chinaand Korea added to what we already know about them justify the con-clusion that we are facing a ruthless adversary who will permit nohumane consideration to inuence his decisions who will strike with-out prior warning and whose ambition is to rule the worldrdquo31

Dispersion might help the admiral concluded Like so much of this lit-

22 Grey Room 04

Opposite top Where the steelindustry is concentrated Source Admiral Ben MoreellldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do toUS Industriesrdquo US News andWorld Report 7 May 1954

Opposite bottom Destroyingsteel Source Moreell ldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do to USIndustriesrdquo

erature issues of protability and patriotism stood side by side and heconcluded under the ag gesturing to the Founding Father ldquoIn timeof peace prepare for warrdquo

Preparations advanced In 1956 Industrial Development a nationalmagazine dedicated to ldquoarea analysis and business site selectionrdquoreported that the Ofce of Area Development had reviewed and approvedsome fty-eight of the self-prepared urban area surveys Money talkedBy mid-June 1955 projects valued at $30 billion had qualied for taxabatements under the program

Take Milwaukee In December 1953 the cityrsquos mayor Frank Zeidlertraveled to the White House where the president addressed some twohundred large-city mayors in stark terms ldquoFor the rst time in historycities have become principal targets for an enemy seeking to conquerour nation The city has moved from a position of support in the rear Ithas moved out into the front linerdquo Immediately Zeidler arrangedto meet with the Wisconsin governor and the mayors of RacineMadison and Green Joining the chorus of civil defense authorities themayors agreed that in the short term they would need plans for rapidevacuation in the event of a nuclear attack at the same time theyneeded to begin longer-term planning for the dispersal of the city By

Galison | War against the Center 23

May 1954 Milwaukee had its report ldquoNew building in the core of anurban target [ought to] be prohibited except when it replaces existingstructures This is intended to halt the pouring of greater target valuesinto areas which are already richly rewarding as targetsrdquo Spreadingindustry wasnrsquot all that the report advocated The new region wouldneed new school districts novel tax structures and alternative typesof local governments Zoning would force dispersal from the centerinstitute bands of open space and deliver industrial plants to hinter-lands deliberately bypassed by major radial or circumferential roads inorder to avoid creating secondary concentrations ldquoThere is little doubtrdquothe reportrsquos author reckoned ldquothat some of [these] measures wouldhave to be fought through the Supreme Court before they were acceptedby allrdquo32 Pressed by national codes taxes defense spending andimprecations by the president on down local and federal authoritiescompeted to outdo the other in the rush away from the targeted center

America was not alone in declaring war on the urban center Canadain the midst of a major effort to plan urban growth in 1956 also begandefensive dispersal The Ofce of the Civil Defence Coordinator in col-laboration with the Defence Research Board and McGill Universityprepared a Guide to Urban Dispersal ldquoDispersal is the characteristicof present day urban growthrdquo the authors asserted Satellite towns andvillages made urban regions the right scale on which to re-think pat-terns of communication government and demography ldquoDefence iscritical In modern warfare the initial blow is struck at the civilian pop-ulation to destroy at a stroke the ability to resist The greatest vulnera-bility lies in urban concentrationmdashthe greatest security would beachieved by urban dispersalrdquo That dispersal would follow a survey ofa ring located an H-bomb radius away from the regional center That is

24 Grey Room 04

where the Guide came in Based in part on a real area and in part ongeneric characteristics the book was a how-to manual for planning thescattering of the urban into the regional Slope of the land location ofwater avenues of communication and transport needs all had to bereckoned The Guide instructed local leaders and planners how to dia-gram all this for their future Satellite towns would perch outside thering of safetymdashtowns that under no circumstances ought to attractmore than forty thousand inhabitants Ultimately government-pro-pelled ldquourban regionsrdquo would replace the ldquoamorphous formrdquo of currentmetropolitan development alleviating social and economic problemswhile securing spatial defense against thermonuclear attack33 City bycity country by country the bomb helped drive dispersion Indeedcoming full circle the Germans already all too familiar with aerialbombardment began preparing for a rain of hydrogen bombsHannover Bremen and Duumlsseldorf issued the rst three analyses andothers would follow Their comprehensive treatments covered the sta-tus of police re hospital postal service and road service followinga nuclear attack34

Preparation for atomic war was certainly on President Dwight DEisenhowerrsquos mind as he strove to resuscitate the long-debated federalhighway system Franklin D Roosevelt had pushed the idea in the1930s not least for its promise of providing jobs Reports rolled in TheBureau of Public Roads undertook one in 1938 and the chairman ofthat organization presided over another called Interregional Highwaysdated 1943 Other reports and standards marched on through the warwith some actually leading to road buildingmdashin 1947 crews began cut-ting the rst miles of interstate highways Still by the time Eisenhowercame into office in January 1953 there were but six thousand or somiles of road improvements actually on the ground (at a cost of nearly$1 billion)

Eisenhower liked highways He had struggled across the country ina motorized convoy back in 1919 an unpleasant sixty-two days of slip-ping on ice sticking in mud breaking into wooden bridges and freez-ing under snow The contrast with Germany was stark As SupremeCommander General Eisenhower had been astonished by the auto-bahns taking particular note of the advantages that road system affordedas he had to move masses of men and mateacuteriel across the conqueredReich ldquoGermany made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons acrossthe landrdquo On July 12 1954 Vice President Richard Nixon facing theconference of state governors at Lake George New York read fromEisenhowerrsquos prepared speech and the message was clear The obso-lete network had to go its antiquated byways were clogging the roadsand courts while leaving a death toll on the citizenry comparable to

Galison | War against the Center 25

Industrial dispersal 1956 Solidcircles show cities where dispersalplans were approved by late 1955dotted circles indicate communi-ties where plans were under prepa-ration Source Theodore K PasmaldquoIndustrial Dispersal 1956rdquo Indus-trial Development The NationalMagazine of Area Analysis andBusiness Site Selection (January-February 1956)

ldquoa bloody warrdquo But Eisenhowerrsquos final jab at the current system wasstark holding up for public contemplation its ldquoappalling inadequaciesto meet the demands of catastrophe or defense should an atomic warcomerdquo35 Radial roads would afford clear routes for city evacuationCircumferential roads Project East River had recommended back in1952 should be encouraged wherever possible to drain industry andpopulation from the dense city centers36 In fact highway designersconsulted with federal civil defense agencies and military plannersaimed for interstate highways that would bypass urban areas to avoidldquoroute[s] that had suffered a direct A-bomb hitrdquo37 It took two years ofpolitical wrangling and it goes without saying that economic housingand non-nuclear forces for the interstate were surely among its powerfulmotors By the end of 1956 the Interstate and Defense Highway Systemhad fundingmdashsome $25 billion of federal support38

3 Distributed KnowledgeBy 1960 the Air Force began dreaming worse nightmares than nuke-ladenbombers bullying their way past ghter defense Atomic strikes againstthe continental United States could be launched with missiles forwhich range of ight was no longer an issue The RAND Corporationmade its mark with contracts to think about this thermonuclear threatfrom the new think tank issued shelves of studies including thefamous (and famously parodied) volume by Herman Kahn On Thermo-nuclear War Just as Kahn stepped into the limelight the much lesswell known Paul Baran an electrical engineer coming from HughesAircraft Companyrsquos systems group joined RAND His job was todevelop a scheme that would ensure the survival of the US telecom-munications infrastructure through a Russian rst strikemdasha vital linknot only for domestic communication but also for command and con-trol His response in a series of papers launched in 1960 was a plan toremove completely critical nodes from the telephone system Like thethree highways many wanted from each dispersed defense plantBaranrsquos vision aimed for safety in redundantly connected spatially dis-tributed mini-centers

Here is how Baran put it in one of his rst papers

The cloud-of-doom attitude that nuclear war spells the end of theearth is slowly lifting from the minds of the many Better quanti-tative estimates of post-attack destruction together with a lessemotional discussion of the alternatives may mark the end of theldquowhat the hellmdashwhatrsquos the userdquo era A new view emerges the pos-sibility of a war exists but there is much that can be done to min-imize the consequences

26 Grey Room 04

De nition of redundancy Paul Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunications I Introductionto Distributed CommunicationsNetworkrdquo RAND Corporationmemorandum RM-3420-PRAugust 1964

Survivable atomic warmdashthe goal of the fteen-year struggle since theSurvey crew picked through the still radioactive rubble at HiroshimaBaran again

If war does not mean the end of the earth in a black and whitemanner then it follows that we should do those things that makethe shade of gray as light as possible to plan now to minimizepotential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permitthe survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstructthe economy swiftly39

That reconstruction demanded the elimination of the hierarchical center alternately referred to over these rst decades of the cold war asthe linchpin the bottleneck and the node

The problem as Baran formulated it did involve new equipment tolabel digitally each packet of information with a ldquotordquo and ldquofromrdquo andthen to route these fragments over diverse paths toward their eventualreassembly on arrival But before anything could be built moved dig-itized or reinforced the conceptual problem required attention Thatreconceptualization now took as it had not before a mathematicalform If nodes were replaced with redundant links how could heexploit the information-theoretic approach of Claude Shannon to countthe surviving paths between points in the array

Here is how Baran reasoned

Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network whichwill allow several hundred major communications stations to talkwith one another after an enemy attack As a criterion of surviv-ability we elect to use the percentage of stations both survivingthe physical attack and remaining in electrical connection withthe largest single group of surviving stations This criterion ischosen as a conservative measure of the ability of the survivingstations to operate together as a coherent entity after the attack40

With the result that a redundancy of at least R = 3would ensure a likely survival rate of nearly 75 percentBaran could now sketch the distributed system thatwould vouchsafe communication after nuclear war

Worst obviously was the centralized node that rep-resented the single critical target This was the situationwith concentrated steel electricity or oil plants it wasthe structure of the hubbed railway system It was inshort the bombing plannerrsquos dream and the bombingvictimrsquos nightmare Decentralized nodes that main-tained a local hierarchical structure were clearly better

Galison | War against the Center 27

a complete grid structure was best of all To a certain extent such gridsstood for the defensive ideal of dispersion more generally By increasingthe number of targets one decreased the likelihood of incapacitationHalting abortive and awkward though it was Baranrsquos scheme (alongwith a similar one developed in England) slowly wended its way throughdifferent incarnations in the ARPANET and Milnet But the elusivegoal all through these decades of distributed communication was a dis-tributed grid or mesh a thrust in the rst instance aimed at removingthe critical node Though in the garb of nuclear survivability the gridmay not appear as the redemptive Internet of our dreams that tech-nology grew directly out of fifteen years of longing for a world stillstanding after thermonuclear war41

4 We Are Become TargetsDuring the years of World War II American and British planners andanalysts learned to see through a bombsight Not in a single glimpsebut in the routine killings and losses that accompanied ever more fre-quently repeated raids Twenty-four hours a day day after day monthafter month year after year the planners and analysts studied andrestudied the interdependencies of the German economy circled tar-gets blasted factories leveled cities analyzed the damage and struckagain Chemicals nitric acid methanol Basic materials rubber steeloil aviation gas Transport systems electrical generators And popula-tion centers area bombing by the combined American and Britishforces killed some 600000 Germans In a war that the Nazis renderedever more vicious even as their defeat seemed inevitable the Americansrsquoearly dreams of precision bombing went by the way Two hundredplanes over Schweinfurt then four hundred but also Hamburg LuumlbeckMuumlnster Berlin Dresden Regensburg year after year Measuring bombloads accuracies reconstruction time 35 ton of bombs per acre toinduce damage of 8 percent delay time for reconstruction two and a

28 Grey Room 04

half months A calculus of fractions probabilities delaysBy the warrsquos end a new category of analyst had come into existence

more often than not social scientists and industrialists but also human-ists diplomats mathematicians and natural scientists Piecing togetherfragments of intelligence examining reconnaissance photographs theypainted an elaborate portrait of a wartime foe By warrsquos end the Surveyanalysts had come to see German and Japanese cities through what onemight call a ldquodestructive functionalismrdquo dependencies leading back-ward they kept hoping to the ever-elusive linchpin that when pulledwould topple the structure Schweinfurt was supposed to be one suchpoint with its all-important bearing factories And after Schweinfurtthere were other ldquobottlenecksrdquo to be targeted other cities other plantsother transshipment points

Perhaps before Hiroshima the bombsight eye had already begun toreect back I donrsquot know But in the atomic rubble as the analysts inter-viewed hundreds of blast survivors and canvassed the broken struc-tures as they methodically noted which kinds of concrete walls stillstood at various radii of destruction they began quite explicitly to seethemselves to see America through the bombardierrsquos eye They beganto wonder what an American city would look like after the bomb hadfallen Returning to the United States and publishing their StrategicBombing Survey things began to look different They began to see them-selves their towns and factories on the crosshairs of radial targetingmaps Far from a technological determinism the all-too material tech-nologies and concepts of self were fully imbricated

One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics launched when NorbertWiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedbackmachine that could be mimicked electronically from there it was a shortstep to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way Then humanphysiology began to appear as a cybernetic system then the humanmind then life then even the world system as a whole42 Somewherein the midst of total war a technocratic vision of a technical EnemyOther rose to become a vision of ourselves It was but a heartbeat beforecybernetics saturated the writings of Gregory Bateson and MargaretMead not to speak of philosophers planners and architects

But the consequence was this Three years before the Russians hadthe bomb in fact before on just about anyonersquos account the cold warhad begun American analysts were already advocating a massive dis-persion of factories and populations against atomic aerial attack

As the cold war arms race accelerated the search for ldquodefense in spacerdquogrew more desperate jet bombers atomic bombs hydrogen bombsintercontinental ballistic missiles With each step more frantic urgingto spread the cities into their ldquomarketing areasrdquo Highway systems

Galison | War against the Center 29

Centralized decentralized and distributed networksSource Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

Galison | War against the Center 19

Top row left to right Self-targeting step I Take the listof government designated defense-related industries and plot theirlocation and employment This isthe rst task towards the construc-tion of areas known as the highlyindustrialized sections Source USDepartment of Commerce Indus-trial Dispersion Guidebook forCommunities Domestic CommerceSeries no 31 (Washington DCUS Government Printing Of ce1952)

Self-targeting step II To completethe construction of the perimeterof the highly industrialized sectionsdraw circles of four-mile radiusconnect centers of circles contain-ing more than 16000 workersSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step III Label populations from census tractsSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Bottom row left to right Self-targeting step IV To completethe construction of the denselypopulated sections draw circles offour-mile radius and connect thecenters of circles with more than200000 inhabitants SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Self-targeting step V Now super-impose the highly industrializedarea on the densely populatedarea Taken together they form the potential A-bomb Target zoneSource Industrial DispersionGuidebook

Self-targeting step VI Drawingthe potential A-bomb target zoneon a regional map planners shouldnow construct a safety margin often miles from the outside of theendangered area All new industrialplants should be dispersed out-side this ten-mile radius SourceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook

Census-tract population centers with population gures

accelerated tax amortization) facilitating the approval of defense loansand securing defense contracts

Bombing the Axis economy and dispersing the American one werereflections of one another When Charles E Wilson director of theOffice of Defense Mobilization came before the National SecurityResources Board of the Presidentrsquos Executive Office he needed anexpert on how to disperse industry To the captains of industry assem-bled for a 1951 hearing Wilson sought to justify his strictures aboutsplitting plants by ten or twenty miles ldquoMr Gorrie brought me a realexpert on that I call him a real expert because he was one of the menwho had done bombing in the industrial arena of Germany and cer-tainly he convinced me that 10 or 20 miles provides reasonable safetyrdquo25

Bombers braced for bombsIn 1952 Project East River (Associated Universities contracted to the

federal government) reported on how Washington could drive indus-try outside the expanding urban areas ldquoleapfroggingrdquo away from urbancores One role was to create ldquopublic understandingrdquo of the need forldquosatellite townrdquo planning and its defense use More materially theEast River gang reported the federal government should provide aidto assist in the construction of urban arteries to the satellite towns pro-vide rent subsidies to small businesses send appropriations to matchmetropolitan planning units offer tax assistance for new constructionin outlying areas demand dispersal to qualify for federal defenseinsurance and promote federal loans and grants for the constructionof outlying schools streets water and sewers The government shouldsubsidize ring roads around citiesmdashlike Route 128 around Bostonmdashand strive to locate defense industry on it Above all the fast-increas-ing population ofce building and industry heading into cities had tobe reversed Throughout constant vigilance against the re-creation ofnew centers26

Eponymously the report took as its ldquoarea studyrdquo the imagined caseof a Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapon detonated several thousand feetabove a 260-acre rectangle in Manhattan adjacent to the East RiverWith detailed information about the age structure and flammabilityof individual buildingsmdashand recent census datamdashthis not-so-typicalpiece of America could then be tracked as it shattered and burnedunder the assault of nuclear attack How many of the 35000 peopleresiding between 59th and 72nd Streets (between 3rd Avenue and theriver) would become casualties if a weapon were to be exploded at 2 AM How many minutesrsquo warning would they have to take shelterHow much radiation would they receive Would a firestorm eruptBased principally on the results of the US Strategic Bombing Surveyon Hiroshima and Nagasaki this report was in a sense a dully terrifying

20 Grey Room 04

answer to the question the Bombing Survey had posed seven years earlier What would the bombs that were let loose over Hiroshima havelooked like were they to have been dropped back home27

Under the guidance of these various boards and the lucrative drawof taxes loans and contracts one by one key industrial and civic leaderslearned to see themselves through the reflection of a bombsight Oneby one they began plotting their own dispersion In September 1955for example the Chemical and Engineering News reported on atomicvulnerability in the chemical process industry Nuclear weapons jetairplanes and the concept of total war combined wrote Neil P HurleySJ to blur the distinction between military force and industrial poten-tial The role of an industrymdashits functional interdependence on otherindustriesmdashxed the likelihood of its plants becoming targets Chemical-process industries were vulnerable on two fronts geographic concen-tration and functional criticality The conclusion was as inevitable asit was fearsome ldquoThree well-directed H-bombs on these key targetareas would have serious consequences for the industrial chemicalproducing complexrdquo28 Two-thirds of workers making industrial chem-icals lived in ten states

American chemical dispersion in 1955 was directly and explicitlylinked to German chemical dispersion in 1945 Over and over againHurley cited the Strategic Bombing Survey ldquoIt is worth noting thatantifriction bearings represented an Achilles heel in the German econ-omy in World War II The Strategic Bombing Survey indicated a paral-ysis of German industry following Allied air force bombings ofSchweinfurt where more than 50 of German antifriction bearingswere producedrdquo Four H-bombs for example could wipe out half the UScapacity to produce instruments and related products ldquoUnfortunatelythe US has many Schweinfurts In the Great Lakes region are to befound 47 of the nonelectrical machinery productionrdquo A saturationattack on that regionmdashand saturation would not take many bombsmdashwould Hurley noted destroy a vast array of industries including thatof chemicals29

Throughout the 1950s the Strategic Bombing Survey remained cen-tral to thinking about nuclear warfare and the dispersion of industryHurley for example in constructing his report on American chemicalpriorities reproduced the Surveyrsquos list of the ten most vital chemicalsfor the German war effort from nitrogen methanol and calcium car-bide down to caustic soda chlorine and sodium carbonate He reca-pitulated the Surveyrsquos conclusions about the shortages of nitric acid onthe manufacture of explosives the reduction of methanol that cut intothe making of high explosives and the Germansrsquo vain last-ditch effortsto create underground factories In this new narrative Americans

Galison | War against the Center 21

played the role previously performed by Germans Russians took overthe bombing role from the Allies Those who had used their knowledgeof American industry had planned the strategic bombing of the Axisnow they became the potential bombing victims readying plans to disperse Here is Hurley

To avoid a repetition in this country of the unfortunate experi-ences of the Germans during World War II necessary moves mustbe made before any outbreak of hostilities The Germans enjoyedthe luxury of learning from their mistakes It is highly doubtfulwhether in the atomic age any nation will have the same oppor-tunitymdashone mistake may well be the last30

Dispersal could aid in reconstruction and also preventionmdasha strongernation ldquoprotected in spacerdquo (as the phrase went) would deter any attacker

Admiral Ben Moreell retired from the Navy and in the mid-1950schairman of Jones amp Laughlin Steel Corporation had just presented tothe secretary of commerce the manifesto of the purposes of the Ironand Steel Advisory Council The council had urged a mobilization planfor steel in light of the threat presented by high-speed jet airplaneslong-range missiles and nuclear weapons that ldquoour prospectiveenemyrdquo might at any time hurl without warning Big steel needed acomplete control center one linked by telegraph and radio to the steel-making plants Admiral Moreell and his fellow advisers emphasizedthe proximate danger of Russians with H-bombs and in fact asMoreell noted they had one just a few days after his committee laid itsreport at Commerce Worriedly the admiral allowed that 75 percent ofAmerican steelmaking capacity could be destroyed by a mere tenhydrogen bombs The councilrsquos recommendation disperse 25 percentof the capacity in such a way that the resulting plants would be splitup into numerous single-function plants providing each plant with atleast three alternative modes for transporting its products It was timeMoreell intoned to take similar measures in a host of other industriesincluding rubber copper glass aluminum textiles automobiles andelectrical products Prepare for real costs for steel alone the disper-sion bill would run to some $10 billion

Moreell ldquoPerhaps I have overemphasized the hazard under whichwe now live I do not believe so The facts which are coming out withrespect to the tactics and policies of the Communist enemy in Chinaand Korea added to what we already know about them justify the con-clusion that we are facing a ruthless adversary who will permit nohumane consideration to inuence his decisions who will strike with-out prior warning and whose ambition is to rule the worldrdquo31

Dispersion might help the admiral concluded Like so much of this lit-

22 Grey Room 04

Opposite top Where the steelindustry is concentrated Source Admiral Ben MoreellldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do toUS Industriesrdquo US News andWorld Report 7 May 1954

Opposite bottom Destroyingsteel Source Moreell ldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do to USIndustriesrdquo

erature issues of protability and patriotism stood side by side and heconcluded under the ag gesturing to the Founding Father ldquoIn timeof peace prepare for warrdquo

Preparations advanced In 1956 Industrial Development a nationalmagazine dedicated to ldquoarea analysis and business site selectionrdquoreported that the Ofce of Area Development had reviewed and approvedsome fty-eight of the self-prepared urban area surveys Money talkedBy mid-June 1955 projects valued at $30 billion had qualied for taxabatements under the program

Take Milwaukee In December 1953 the cityrsquos mayor Frank Zeidlertraveled to the White House where the president addressed some twohundred large-city mayors in stark terms ldquoFor the rst time in historycities have become principal targets for an enemy seeking to conquerour nation The city has moved from a position of support in the rear Ithas moved out into the front linerdquo Immediately Zeidler arrangedto meet with the Wisconsin governor and the mayors of RacineMadison and Green Joining the chorus of civil defense authorities themayors agreed that in the short term they would need plans for rapidevacuation in the event of a nuclear attack at the same time theyneeded to begin longer-term planning for the dispersal of the city By

Galison | War against the Center 23

May 1954 Milwaukee had its report ldquoNew building in the core of anurban target [ought to] be prohibited except when it replaces existingstructures This is intended to halt the pouring of greater target valuesinto areas which are already richly rewarding as targetsrdquo Spreadingindustry wasnrsquot all that the report advocated The new region wouldneed new school districts novel tax structures and alternative typesof local governments Zoning would force dispersal from the centerinstitute bands of open space and deliver industrial plants to hinter-lands deliberately bypassed by major radial or circumferential roads inorder to avoid creating secondary concentrations ldquoThere is little doubtrdquothe reportrsquos author reckoned ldquothat some of [these] measures wouldhave to be fought through the Supreme Court before they were acceptedby allrdquo32 Pressed by national codes taxes defense spending andimprecations by the president on down local and federal authoritiescompeted to outdo the other in the rush away from the targeted center

America was not alone in declaring war on the urban center Canadain the midst of a major effort to plan urban growth in 1956 also begandefensive dispersal The Ofce of the Civil Defence Coordinator in col-laboration with the Defence Research Board and McGill Universityprepared a Guide to Urban Dispersal ldquoDispersal is the characteristicof present day urban growthrdquo the authors asserted Satellite towns andvillages made urban regions the right scale on which to re-think pat-terns of communication government and demography ldquoDefence iscritical In modern warfare the initial blow is struck at the civilian pop-ulation to destroy at a stroke the ability to resist The greatest vulnera-bility lies in urban concentrationmdashthe greatest security would beachieved by urban dispersalrdquo That dispersal would follow a survey ofa ring located an H-bomb radius away from the regional center That is

24 Grey Room 04

where the Guide came in Based in part on a real area and in part ongeneric characteristics the book was a how-to manual for planning thescattering of the urban into the regional Slope of the land location ofwater avenues of communication and transport needs all had to bereckoned The Guide instructed local leaders and planners how to dia-gram all this for their future Satellite towns would perch outside thering of safetymdashtowns that under no circumstances ought to attractmore than forty thousand inhabitants Ultimately government-pro-pelled ldquourban regionsrdquo would replace the ldquoamorphous formrdquo of currentmetropolitan development alleviating social and economic problemswhile securing spatial defense against thermonuclear attack33 City bycity country by country the bomb helped drive dispersion Indeedcoming full circle the Germans already all too familiar with aerialbombardment began preparing for a rain of hydrogen bombsHannover Bremen and Duumlsseldorf issued the rst three analyses andothers would follow Their comprehensive treatments covered the sta-tus of police re hospital postal service and road service followinga nuclear attack34

Preparation for atomic war was certainly on President Dwight DEisenhowerrsquos mind as he strove to resuscitate the long-debated federalhighway system Franklin D Roosevelt had pushed the idea in the1930s not least for its promise of providing jobs Reports rolled in TheBureau of Public Roads undertook one in 1938 and the chairman ofthat organization presided over another called Interregional Highwaysdated 1943 Other reports and standards marched on through the warwith some actually leading to road buildingmdashin 1947 crews began cut-ting the rst miles of interstate highways Still by the time Eisenhowercame into office in January 1953 there were but six thousand or somiles of road improvements actually on the ground (at a cost of nearly$1 billion)

Eisenhower liked highways He had struggled across the country ina motorized convoy back in 1919 an unpleasant sixty-two days of slip-ping on ice sticking in mud breaking into wooden bridges and freez-ing under snow The contrast with Germany was stark As SupremeCommander General Eisenhower had been astonished by the auto-bahns taking particular note of the advantages that road system affordedas he had to move masses of men and mateacuteriel across the conqueredReich ldquoGermany made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons acrossthe landrdquo On July 12 1954 Vice President Richard Nixon facing theconference of state governors at Lake George New York read fromEisenhowerrsquos prepared speech and the message was clear The obso-lete network had to go its antiquated byways were clogging the roadsand courts while leaving a death toll on the citizenry comparable to

Galison | War against the Center 25

Industrial dispersal 1956 Solidcircles show cities where dispersalplans were approved by late 1955dotted circles indicate communi-ties where plans were under prepa-ration Source Theodore K PasmaldquoIndustrial Dispersal 1956rdquo Indus-trial Development The NationalMagazine of Area Analysis andBusiness Site Selection (January-February 1956)

ldquoa bloody warrdquo But Eisenhowerrsquos final jab at the current system wasstark holding up for public contemplation its ldquoappalling inadequaciesto meet the demands of catastrophe or defense should an atomic warcomerdquo35 Radial roads would afford clear routes for city evacuationCircumferential roads Project East River had recommended back in1952 should be encouraged wherever possible to drain industry andpopulation from the dense city centers36 In fact highway designersconsulted with federal civil defense agencies and military plannersaimed for interstate highways that would bypass urban areas to avoidldquoroute[s] that had suffered a direct A-bomb hitrdquo37 It took two years ofpolitical wrangling and it goes without saying that economic housingand non-nuclear forces for the interstate were surely among its powerfulmotors By the end of 1956 the Interstate and Defense Highway Systemhad fundingmdashsome $25 billion of federal support38

3 Distributed KnowledgeBy 1960 the Air Force began dreaming worse nightmares than nuke-ladenbombers bullying their way past ghter defense Atomic strikes againstthe continental United States could be launched with missiles forwhich range of ight was no longer an issue The RAND Corporationmade its mark with contracts to think about this thermonuclear threatfrom the new think tank issued shelves of studies including thefamous (and famously parodied) volume by Herman Kahn On Thermo-nuclear War Just as Kahn stepped into the limelight the much lesswell known Paul Baran an electrical engineer coming from HughesAircraft Companyrsquos systems group joined RAND His job was todevelop a scheme that would ensure the survival of the US telecom-munications infrastructure through a Russian rst strikemdasha vital linknot only for domestic communication but also for command and con-trol His response in a series of papers launched in 1960 was a plan toremove completely critical nodes from the telephone system Like thethree highways many wanted from each dispersed defense plantBaranrsquos vision aimed for safety in redundantly connected spatially dis-tributed mini-centers

Here is how Baran put it in one of his rst papers

The cloud-of-doom attitude that nuclear war spells the end of theearth is slowly lifting from the minds of the many Better quanti-tative estimates of post-attack destruction together with a lessemotional discussion of the alternatives may mark the end of theldquowhat the hellmdashwhatrsquos the userdquo era A new view emerges the pos-sibility of a war exists but there is much that can be done to min-imize the consequences

26 Grey Room 04

De nition of redundancy Paul Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunications I Introductionto Distributed CommunicationsNetworkrdquo RAND Corporationmemorandum RM-3420-PRAugust 1964

Survivable atomic warmdashthe goal of the fteen-year struggle since theSurvey crew picked through the still radioactive rubble at HiroshimaBaran again

If war does not mean the end of the earth in a black and whitemanner then it follows that we should do those things that makethe shade of gray as light as possible to plan now to minimizepotential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permitthe survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstructthe economy swiftly39

That reconstruction demanded the elimination of the hierarchical center alternately referred to over these rst decades of the cold war asthe linchpin the bottleneck and the node

The problem as Baran formulated it did involve new equipment tolabel digitally each packet of information with a ldquotordquo and ldquofromrdquo andthen to route these fragments over diverse paths toward their eventualreassembly on arrival But before anything could be built moved dig-itized or reinforced the conceptual problem required attention Thatreconceptualization now took as it had not before a mathematicalform If nodes were replaced with redundant links how could heexploit the information-theoretic approach of Claude Shannon to countthe surviving paths between points in the array

Here is how Baran reasoned

Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network whichwill allow several hundred major communications stations to talkwith one another after an enemy attack As a criterion of surviv-ability we elect to use the percentage of stations both survivingthe physical attack and remaining in electrical connection withthe largest single group of surviving stations This criterion ischosen as a conservative measure of the ability of the survivingstations to operate together as a coherent entity after the attack40

With the result that a redundancy of at least R = 3would ensure a likely survival rate of nearly 75 percentBaran could now sketch the distributed system thatwould vouchsafe communication after nuclear war

Worst obviously was the centralized node that rep-resented the single critical target This was the situationwith concentrated steel electricity or oil plants it wasthe structure of the hubbed railway system It was inshort the bombing plannerrsquos dream and the bombingvictimrsquos nightmare Decentralized nodes that main-tained a local hierarchical structure were clearly better

Galison | War against the Center 27

a complete grid structure was best of all To a certain extent such gridsstood for the defensive ideal of dispersion more generally By increasingthe number of targets one decreased the likelihood of incapacitationHalting abortive and awkward though it was Baranrsquos scheme (alongwith a similar one developed in England) slowly wended its way throughdifferent incarnations in the ARPANET and Milnet But the elusivegoal all through these decades of distributed communication was a dis-tributed grid or mesh a thrust in the rst instance aimed at removingthe critical node Though in the garb of nuclear survivability the gridmay not appear as the redemptive Internet of our dreams that tech-nology grew directly out of fifteen years of longing for a world stillstanding after thermonuclear war41

4 We Are Become TargetsDuring the years of World War II American and British planners andanalysts learned to see through a bombsight Not in a single glimpsebut in the routine killings and losses that accompanied ever more fre-quently repeated raids Twenty-four hours a day day after day monthafter month year after year the planners and analysts studied andrestudied the interdependencies of the German economy circled tar-gets blasted factories leveled cities analyzed the damage and struckagain Chemicals nitric acid methanol Basic materials rubber steeloil aviation gas Transport systems electrical generators And popula-tion centers area bombing by the combined American and Britishforces killed some 600000 Germans In a war that the Nazis renderedever more vicious even as their defeat seemed inevitable the Americansrsquoearly dreams of precision bombing went by the way Two hundredplanes over Schweinfurt then four hundred but also Hamburg LuumlbeckMuumlnster Berlin Dresden Regensburg year after year Measuring bombloads accuracies reconstruction time 35 ton of bombs per acre toinduce damage of 8 percent delay time for reconstruction two and a

28 Grey Room 04

half months A calculus of fractions probabilities delaysBy the warrsquos end a new category of analyst had come into existence

more often than not social scientists and industrialists but also human-ists diplomats mathematicians and natural scientists Piecing togetherfragments of intelligence examining reconnaissance photographs theypainted an elaborate portrait of a wartime foe By warrsquos end the Surveyanalysts had come to see German and Japanese cities through what onemight call a ldquodestructive functionalismrdquo dependencies leading back-ward they kept hoping to the ever-elusive linchpin that when pulledwould topple the structure Schweinfurt was supposed to be one suchpoint with its all-important bearing factories And after Schweinfurtthere were other ldquobottlenecksrdquo to be targeted other cities other plantsother transshipment points

Perhaps before Hiroshima the bombsight eye had already begun toreect back I donrsquot know But in the atomic rubble as the analysts inter-viewed hundreds of blast survivors and canvassed the broken struc-tures as they methodically noted which kinds of concrete walls stillstood at various radii of destruction they began quite explicitly to seethemselves to see America through the bombardierrsquos eye They beganto wonder what an American city would look like after the bomb hadfallen Returning to the United States and publishing their StrategicBombing Survey things began to look different They began to see them-selves their towns and factories on the crosshairs of radial targetingmaps Far from a technological determinism the all-too material tech-nologies and concepts of self were fully imbricated

One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics launched when NorbertWiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedbackmachine that could be mimicked electronically from there it was a shortstep to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way Then humanphysiology began to appear as a cybernetic system then the humanmind then life then even the world system as a whole42 Somewherein the midst of total war a technocratic vision of a technical EnemyOther rose to become a vision of ourselves It was but a heartbeat beforecybernetics saturated the writings of Gregory Bateson and MargaretMead not to speak of philosophers planners and architects

But the consequence was this Three years before the Russians hadthe bomb in fact before on just about anyonersquos account the cold warhad begun American analysts were already advocating a massive dis-persion of factories and populations against atomic aerial attack

As the cold war arms race accelerated the search for ldquodefense in spacerdquogrew more desperate jet bombers atomic bombs hydrogen bombsintercontinental ballistic missiles With each step more frantic urgingto spread the cities into their ldquomarketing areasrdquo Highway systems

Galison | War against the Center 29

Centralized decentralized and distributed networksSource Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

accelerated tax amortization) facilitating the approval of defense loansand securing defense contracts

Bombing the Axis economy and dispersing the American one werereflections of one another When Charles E Wilson director of theOffice of Defense Mobilization came before the National SecurityResources Board of the Presidentrsquos Executive Office he needed anexpert on how to disperse industry To the captains of industry assem-bled for a 1951 hearing Wilson sought to justify his strictures aboutsplitting plants by ten or twenty miles ldquoMr Gorrie brought me a realexpert on that I call him a real expert because he was one of the menwho had done bombing in the industrial arena of Germany and cer-tainly he convinced me that 10 or 20 miles provides reasonable safetyrdquo25

Bombers braced for bombsIn 1952 Project East River (Associated Universities contracted to the

federal government) reported on how Washington could drive indus-try outside the expanding urban areas ldquoleapfroggingrdquo away from urbancores One role was to create ldquopublic understandingrdquo of the need forldquosatellite townrdquo planning and its defense use More materially theEast River gang reported the federal government should provide aidto assist in the construction of urban arteries to the satellite towns pro-vide rent subsidies to small businesses send appropriations to matchmetropolitan planning units offer tax assistance for new constructionin outlying areas demand dispersal to qualify for federal defenseinsurance and promote federal loans and grants for the constructionof outlying schools streets water and sewers The government shouldsubsidize ring roads around citiesmdashlike Route 128 around Bostonmdashand strive to locate defense industry on it Above all the fast-increas-ing population ofce building and industry heading into cities had tobe reversed Throughout constant vigilance against the re-creation ofnew centers26

Eponymously the report took as its ldquoarea studyrdquo the imagined caseof a Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapon detonated several thousand feetabove a 260-acre rectangle in Manhattan adjacent to the East RiverWith detailed information about the age structure and flammabilityof individual buildingsmdashand recent census datamdashthis not-so-typicalpiece of America could then be tracked as it shattered and burnedunder the assault of nuclear attack How many of the 35000 peopleresiding between 59th and 72nd Streets (between 3rd Avenue and theriver) would become casualties if a weapon were to be exploded at 2 AM How many minutesrsquo warning would they have to take shelterHow much radiation would they receive Would a firestorm eruptBased principally on the results of the US Strategic Bombing Surveyon Hiroshima and Nagasaki this report was in a sense a dully terrifying

20 Grey Room 04

answer to the question the Bombing Survey had posed seven years earlier What would the bombs that were let loose over Hiroshima havelooked like were they to have been dropped back home27

Under the guidance of these various boards and the lucrative drawof taxes loans and contracts one by one key industrial and civic leaderslearned to see themselves through the reflection of a bombsight Oneby one they began plotting their own dispersion In September 1955for example the Chemical and Engineering News reported on atomicvulnerability in the chemical process industry Nuclear weapons jetairplanes and the concept of total war combined wrote Neil P HurleySJ to blur the distinction between military force and industrial poten-tial The role of an industrymdashits functional interdependence on otherindustriesmdashxed the likelihood of its plants becoming targets Chemical-process industries were vulnerable on two fronts geographic concen-tration and functional criticality The conclusion was as inevitable asit was fearsome ldquoThree well-directed H-bombs on these key targetareas would have serious consequences for the industrial chemicalproducing complexrdquo28 Two-thirds of workers making industrial chem-icals lived in ten states

American chemical dispersion in 1955 was directly and explicitlylinked to German chemical dispersion in 1945 Over and over againHurley cited the Strategic Bombing Survey ldquoIt is worth noting thatantifriction bearings represented an Achilles heel in the German econ-omy in World War II The Strategic Bombing Survey indicated a paral-ysis of German industry following Allied air force bombings ofSchweinfurt where more than 50 of German antifriction bearingswere producedrdquo Four H-bombs for example could wipe out half the UScapacity to produce instruments and related products ldquoUnfortunatelythe US has many Schweinfurts In the Great Lakes region are to befound 47 of the nonelectrical machinery productionrdquo A saturationattack on that regionmdashand saturation would not take many bombsmdashwould Hurley noted destroy a vast array of industries including thatof chemicals29

Throughout the 1950s the Strategic Bombing Survey remained cen-tral to thinking about nuclear warfare and the dispersion of industryHurley for example in constructing his report on American chemicalpriorities reproduced the Surveyrsquos list of the ten most vital chemicalsfor the German war effort from nitrogen methanol and calcium car-bide down to caustic soda chlorine and sodium carbonate He reca-pitulated the Surveyrsquos conclusions about the shortages of nitric acid onthe manufacture of explosives the reduction of methanol that cut intothe making of high explosives and the Germansrsquo vain last-ditch effortsto create underground factories In this new narrative Americans

Galison | War against the Center 21

played the role previously performed by Germans Russians took overthe bombing role from the Allies Those who had used their knowledgeof American industry had planned the strategic bombing of the Axisnow they became the potential bombing victims readying plans to disperse Here is Hurley

To avoid a repetition in this country of the unfortunate experi-ences of the Germans during World War II necessary moves mustbe made before any outbreak of hostilities The Germans enjoyedthe luxury of learning from their mistakes It is highly doubtfulwhether in the atomic age any nation will have the same oppor-tunitymdashone mistake may well be the last30

Dispersal could aid in reconstruction and also preventionmdasha strongernation ldquoprotected in spacerdquo (as the phrase went) would deter any attacker

Admiral Ben Moreell retired from the Navy and in the mid-1950schairman of Jones amp Laughlin Steel Corporation had just presented tothe secretary of commerce the manifesto of the purposes of the Ironand Steel Advisory Council The council had urged a mobilization planfor steel in light of the threat presented by high-speed jet airplaneslong-range missiles and nuclear weapons that ldquoour prospectiveenemyrdquo might at any time hurl without warning Big steel needed acomplete control center one linked by telegraph and radio to the steel-making plants Admiral Moreell and his fellow advisers emphasizedthe proximate danger of Russians with H-bombs and in fact asMoreell noted they had one just a few days after his committee laid itsreport at Commerce Worriedly the admiral allowed that 75 percent ofAmerican steelmaking capacity could be destroyed by a mere tenhydrogen bombs The councilrsquos recommendation disperse 25 percentof the capacity in such a way that the resulting plants would be splitup into numerous single-function plants providing each plant with atleast three alternative modes for transporting its products It was timeMoreell intoned to take similar measures in a host of other industriesincluding rubber copper glass aluminum textiles automobiles andelectrical products Prepare for real costs for steel alone the disper-sion bill would run to some $10 billion

Moreell ldquoPerhaps I have overemphasized the hazard under whichwe now live I do not believe so The facts which are coming out withrespect to the tactics and policies of the Communist enemy in Chinaand Korea added to what we already know about them justify the con-clusion that we are facing a ruthless adversary who will permit nohumane consideration to inuence his decisions who will strike with-out prior warning and whose ambition is to rule the worldrdquo31

Dispersion might help the admiral concluded Like so much of this lit-

22 Grey Room 04

Opposite top Where the steelindustry is concentrated Source Admiral Ben MoreellldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do toUS Industriesrdquo US News andWorld Report 7 May 1954

Opposite bottom Destroyingsteel Source Moreell ldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do to USIndustriesrdquo

erature issues of protability and patriotism stood side by side and heconcluded under the ag gesturing to the Founding Father ldquoIn timeof peace prepare for warrdquo

Preparations advanced In 1956 Industrial Development a nationalmagazine dedicated to ldquoarea analysis and business site selectionrdquoreported that the Ofce of Area Development had reviewed and approvedsome fty-eight of the self-prepared urban area surveys Money talkedBy mid-June 1955 projects valued at $30 billion had qualied for taxabatements under the program

Take Milwaukee In December 1953 the cityrsquos mayor Frank Zeidlertraveled to the White House where the president addressed some twohundred large-city mayors in stark terms ldquoFor the rst time in historycities have become principal targets for an enemy seeking to conquerour nation The city has moved from a position of support in the rear Ithas moved out into the front linerdquo Immediately Zeidler arrangedto meet with the Wisconsin governor and the mayors of RacineMadison and Green Joining the chorus of civil defense authorities themayors agreed that in the short term they would need plans for rapidevacuation in the event of a nuclear attack at the same time theyneeded to begin longer-term planning for the dispersal of the city By

Galison | War against the Center 23

May 1954 Milwaukee had its report ldquoNew building in the core of anurban target [ought to] be prohibited except when it replaces existingstructures This is intended to halt the pouring of greater target valuesinto areas which are already richly rewarding as targetsrdquo Spreadingindustry wasnrsquot all that the report advocated The new region wouldneed new school districts novel tax structures and alternative typesof local governments Zoning would force dispersal from the centerinstitute bands of open space and deliver industrial plants to hinter-lands deliberately bypassed by major radial or circumferential roads inorder to avoid creating secondary concentrations ldquoThere is little doubtrdquothe reportrsquos author reckoned ldquothat some of [these] measures wouldhave to be fought through the Supreme Court before they were acceptedby allrdquo32 Pressed by national codes taxes defense spending andimprecations by the president on down local and federal authoritiescompeted to outdo the other in the rush away from the targeted center

America was not alone in declaring war on the urban center Canadain the midst of a major effort to plan urban growth in 1956 also begandefensive dispersal The Ofce of the Civil Defence Coordinator in col-laboration with the Defence Research Board and McGill Universityprepared a Guide to Urban Dispersal ldquoDispersal is the characteristicof present day urban growthrdquo the authors asserted Satellite towns andvillages made urban regions the right scale on which to re-think pat-terns of communication government and demography ldquoDefence iscritical In modern warfare the initial blow is struck at the civilian pop-ulation to destroy at a stroke the ability to resist The greatest vulnera-bility lies in urban concentrationmdashthe greatest security would beachieved by urban dispersalrdquo That dispersal would follow a survey ofa ring located an H-bomb radius away from the regional center That is

24 Grey Room 04

where the Guide came in Based in part on a real area and in part ongeneric characteristics the book was a how-to manual for planning thescattering of the urban into the regional Slope of the land location ofwater avenues of communication and transport needs all had to bereckoned The Guide instructed local leaders and planners how to dia-gram all this for their future Satellite towns would perch outside thering of safetymdashtowns that under no circumstances ought to attractmore than forty thousand inhabitants Ultimately government-pro-pelled ldquourban regionsrdquo would replace the ldquoamorphous formrdquo of currentmetropolitan development alleviating social and economic problemswhile securing spatial defense against thermonuclear attack33 City bycity country by country the bomb helped drive dispersion Indeedcoming full circle the Germans already all too familiar with aerialbombardment began preparing for a rain of hydrogen bombsHannover Bremen and Duumlsseldorf issued the rst three analyses andothers would follow Their comprehensive treatments covered the sta-tus of police re hospital postal service and road service followinga nuclear attack34

Preparation for atomic war was certainly on President Dwight DEisenhowerrsquos mind as he strove to resuscitate the long-debated federalhighway system Franklin D Roosevelt had pushed the idea in the1930s not least for its promise of providing jobs Reports rolled in TheBureau of Public Roads undertook one in 1938 and the chairman ofthat organization presided over another called Interregional Highwaysdated 1943 Other reports and standards marched on through the warwith some actually leading to road buildingmdashin 1947 crews began cut-ting the rst miles of interstate highways Still by the time Eisenhowercame into office in January 1953 there were but six thousand or somiles of road improvements actually on the ground (at a cost of nearly$1 billion)

Eisenhower liked highways He had struggled across the country ina motorized convoy back in 1919 an unpleasant sixty-two days of slip-ping on ice sticking in mud breaking into wooden bridges and freez-ing under snow The contrast with Germany was stark As SupremeCommander General Eisenhower had been astonished by the auto-bahns taking particular note of the advantages that road system affordedas he had to move masses of men and mateacuteriel across the conqueredReich ldquoGermany made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons acrossthe landrdquo On July 12 1954 Vice President Richard Nixon facing theconference of state governors at Lake George New York read fromEisenhowerrsquos prepared speech and the message was clear The obso-lete network had to go its antiquated byways were clogging the roadsand courts while leaving a death toll on the citizenry comparable to

Galison | War against the Center 25

Industrial dispersal 1956 Solidcircles show cities where dispersalplans were approved by late 1955dotted circles indicate communi-ties where plans were under prepa-ration Source Theodore K PasmaldquoIndustrial Dispersal 1956rdquo Indus-trial Development The NationalMagazine of Area Analysis andBusiness Site Selection (January-February 1956)

ldquoa bloody warrdquo But Eisenhowerrsquos final jab at the current system wasstark holding up for public contemplation its ldquoappalling inadequaciesto meet the demands of catastrophe or defense should an atomic warcomerdquo35 Radial roads would afford clear routes for city evacuationCircumferential roads Project East River had recommended back in1952 should be encouraged wherever possible to drain industry andpopulation from the dense city centers36 In fact highway designersconsulted with federal civil defense agencies and military plannersaimed for interstate highways that would bypass urban areas to avoidldquoroute[s] that had suffered a direct A-bomb hitrdquo37 It took two years ofpolitical wrangling and it goes without saying that economic housingand non-nuclear forces for the interstate were surely among its powerfulmotors By the end of 1956 the Interstate and Defense Highway Systemhad fundingmdashsome $25 billion of federal support38

3 Distributed KnowledgeBy 1960 the Air Force began dreaming worse nightmares than nuke-ladenbombers bullying their way past ghter defense Atomic strikes againstthe continental United States could be launched with missiles forwhich range of ight was no longer an issue The RAND Corporationmade its mark with contracts to think about this thermonuclear threatfrom the new think tank issued shelves of studies including thefamous (and famously parodied) volume by Herman Kahn On Thermo-nuclear War Just as Kahn stepped into the limelight the much lesswell known Paul Baran an electrical engineer coming from HughesAircraft Companyrsquos systems group joined RAND His job was todevelop a scheme that would ensure the survival of the US telecom-munications infrastructure through a Russian rst strikemdasha vital linknot only for domestic communication but also for command and con-trol His response in a series of papers launched in 1960 was a plan toremove completely critical nodes from the telephone system Like thethree highways many wanted from each dispersed defense plantBaranrsquos vision aimed for safety in redundantly connected spatially dis-tributed mini-centers

Here is how Baran put it in one of his rst papers

The cloud-of-doom attitude that nuclear war spells the end of theearth is slowly lifting from the minds of the many Better quanti-tative estimates of post-attack destruction together with a lessemotional discussion of the alternatives may mark the end of theldquowhat the hellmdashwhatrsquos the userdquo era A new view emerges the pos-sibility of a war exists but there is much that can be done to min-imize the consequences

26 Grey Room 04

De nition of redundancy Paul Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunications I Introductionto Distributed CommunicationsNetworkrdquo RAND Corporationmemorandum RM-3420-PRAugust 1964

Survivable atomic warmdashthe goal of the fteen-year struggle since theSurvey crew picked through the still radioactive rubble at HiroshimaBaran again

If war does not mean the end of the earth in a black and whitemanner then it follows that we should do those things that makethe shade of gray as light as possible to plan now to minimizepotential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permitthe survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstructthe economy swiftly39

That reconstruction demanded the elimination of the hierarchical center alternately referred to over these rst decades of the cold war asthe linchpin the bottleneck and the node

The problem as Baran formulated it did involve new equipment tolabel digitally each packet of information with a ldquotordquo and ldquofromrdquo andthen to route these fragments over diverse paths toward their eventualreassembly on arrival But before anything could be built moved dig-itized or reinforced the conceptual problem required attention Thatreconceptualization now took as it had not before a mathematicalform If nodes were replaced with redundant links how could heexploit the information-theoretic approach of Claude Shannon to countthe surviving paths between points in the array

Here is how Baran reasoned

Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network whichwill allow several hundred major communications stations to talkwith one another after an enemy attack As a criterion of surviv-ability we elect to use the percentage of stations both survivingthe physical attack and remaining in electrical connection withthe largest single group of surviving stations This criterion ischosen as a conservative measure of the ability of the survivingstations to operate together as a coherent entity after the attack40

With the result that a redundancy of at least R = 3would ensure a likely survival rate of nearly 75 percentBaran could now sketch the distributed system thatwould vouchsafe communication after nuclear war

Worst obviously was the centralized node that rep-resented the single critical target This was the situationwith concentrated steel electricity or oil plants it wasthe structure of the hubbed railway system It was inshort the bombing plannerrsquos dream and the bombingvictimrsquos nightmare Decentralized nodes that main-tained a local hierarchical structure were clearly better

Galison | War against the Center 27

a complete grid structure was best of all To a certain extent such gridsstood for the defensive ideal of dispersion more generally By increasingthe number of targets one decreased the likelihood of incapacitationHalting abortive and awkward though it was Baranrsquos scheme (alongwith a similar one developed in England) slowly wended its way throughdifferent incarnations in the ARPANET and Milnet But the elusivegoal all through these decades of distributed communication was a dis-tributed grid or mesh a thrust in the rst instance aimed at removingthe critical node Though in the garb of nuclear survivability the gridmay not appear as the redemptive Internet of our dreams that tech-nology grew directly out of fifteen years of longing for a world stillstanding after thermonuclear war41

4 We Are Become TargetsDuring the years of World War II American and British planners andanalysts learned to see through a bombsight Not in a single glimpsebut in the routine killings and losses that accompanied ever more fre-quently repeated raids Twenty-four hours a day day after day monthafter month year after year the planners and analysts studied andrestudied the interdependencies of the German economy circled tar-gets blasted factories leveled cities analyzed the damage and struckagain Chemicals nitric acid methanol Basic materials rubber steeloil aviation gas Transport systems electrical generators And popula-tion centers area bombing by the combined American and Britishforces killed some 600000 Germans In a war that the Nazis renderedever more vicious even as their defeat seemed inevitable the Americansrsquoearly dreams of precision bombing went by the way Two hundredplanes over Schweinfurt then four hundred but also Hamburg LuumlbeckMuumlnster Berlin Dresden Regensburg year after year Measuring bombloads accuracies reconstruction time 35 ton of bombs per acre toinduce damage of 8 percent delay time for reconstruction two and a

28 Grey Room 04

half months A calculus of fractions probabilities delaysBy the warrsquos end a new category of analyst had come into existence

more often than not social scientists and industrialists but also human-ists diplomats mathematicians and natural scientists Piecing togetherfragments of intelligence examining reconnaissance photographs theypainted an elaborate portrait of a wartime foe By warrsquos end the Surveyanalysts had come to see German and Japanese cities through what onemight call a ldquodestructive functionalismrdquo dependencies leading back-ward they kept hoping to the ever-elusive linchpin that when pulledwould topple the structure Schweinfurt was supposed to be one suchpoint with its all-important bearing factories And after Schweinfurtthere were other ldquobottlenecksrdquo to be targeted other cities other plantsother transshipment points

Perhaps before Hiroshima the bombsight eye had already begun toreect back I donrsquot know But in the atomic rubble as the analysts inter-viewed hundreds of blast survivors and canvassed the broken struc-tures as they methodically noted which kinds of concrete walls stillstood at various radii of destruction they began quite explicitly to seethemselves to see America through the bombardierrsquos eye They beganto wonder what an American city would look like after the bomb hadfallen Returning to the United States and publishing their StrategicBombing Survey things began to look different They began to see them-selves their towns and factories on the crosshairs of radial targetingmaps Far from a technological determinism the all-too material tech-nologies and concepts of self were fully imbricated

One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics launched when NorbertWiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedbackmachine that could be mimicked electronically from there it was a shortstep to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way Then humanphysiology began to appear as a cybernetic system then the humanmind then life then even the world system as a whole42 Somewherein the midst of total war a technocratic vision of a technical EnemyOther rose to become a vision of ourselves It was but a heartbeat beforecybernetics saturated the writings of Gregory Bateson and MargaretMead not to speak of philosophers planners and architects

But the consequence was this Three years before the Russians hadthe bomb in fact before on just about anyonersquos account the cold warhad begun American analysts were already advocating a massive dis-persion of factories and populations against atomic aerial attack

As the cold war arms race accelerated the search for ldquodefense in spacerdquogrew more desperate jet bombers atomic bombs hydrogen bombsintercontinental ballistic missiles With each step more frantic urgingto spread the cities into their ldquomarketing areasrdquo Highway systems

Galison | War against the Center 29

Centralized decentralized and distributed networksSource Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

answer to the question the Bombing Survey had posed seven years earlier What would the bombs that were let loose over Hiroshima havelooked like were they to have been dropped back home27

Under the guidance of these various boards and the lucrative drawof taxes loans and contracts one by one key industrial and civic leaderslearned to see themselves through the reflection of a bombsight Oneby one they began plotting their own dispersion In September 1955for example the Chemical and Engineering News reported on atomicvulnerability in the chemical process industry Nuclear weapons jetairplanes and the concept of total war combined wrote Neil P HurleySJ to blur the distinction between military force and industrial poten-tial The role of an industrymdashits functional interdependence on otherindustriesmdashxed the likelihood of its plants becoming targets Chemical-process industries were vulnerable on two fronts geographic concen-tration and functional criticality The conclusion was as inevitable asit was fearsome ldquoThree well-directed H-bombs on these key targetareas would have serious consequences for the industrial chemicalproducing complexrdquo28 Two-thirds of workers making industrial chem-icals lived in ten states

American chemical dispersion in 1955 was directly and explicitlylinked to German chemical dispersion in 1945 Over and over againHurley cited the Strategic Bombing Survey ldquoIt is worth noting thatantifriction bearings represented an Achilles heel in the German econ-omy in World War II The Strategic Bombing Survey indicated a paral-ysis of German industry following Allied air force bombings ofSchweinfurt where more than 50 of German antifriction bearingswere producedrdquo Four H-bombs for example could wipe out half the UScapacity to produce instruments and related products ldquoUnfortunatelythe US has many Schweinfurts In the Great Lakes region are to befound 47 of the nonelectrical machinery productionrdquo A saturationattack on that regionmdashand saturation would not take many bombsmdashwould Hurley noted destroy a vast array of industries including thatof chemicals29

Throughout the 1950s the Strategic Bombing Survey remained cen-tral to thinking about nuclear warfare and the dispersion of industryHurley for example in constructing his report on American chemicalpriorities reproduced the Surveyrsquos list of the ten most vital chemicalsfor the German war effort from nitrogen methanol and calcium car-bide down to caustic soda chlorine and sodium carbonate He reca-pitulated the Surveyrsquos conclusions about the shortages of nitric acid onthe manufacture of explosives the reduction of methanol that cut intothe making of high explosives and the Germansrsquo vain last-ditch effortsto create underground factories In this new narrative Americans

Galison | War against the Center 21

played the role previously performed by Germans Russians took overthe bombing role from the Allies Those who had used their knowledgeof American industry had planned the strategic bombing of the Axisnow they became the potential bombing victims readying plans to disperse Here is Hurley

To avoid a repetition in this country of the unfortunate experi-ences of the Germans during World War II necessary moves mustbe made before any outbreak of hostilities The Germans enjoyedthe luxury of learning from their mistakes It is highly doubtfulwhether in the atomic age any nation will have the same oppor-tunitymdashone mistake may well be the last30

Dispersal could aid in reconstruction and also preventionmdasha strongernation ldquoprotected in spacerdquo (as the phrase went) would deter any attacker

Admiral Ben Moreell retired from the Navy and in the mid-1950schairman of Jones amp Laughlin Steel Corporation had just presented tothe secretary of commerce the manifesto of the purposes of the Ironand Steel Advisory Council The council had urged a mobilization planfor steel in light of the threat presented by high-speed jet airplaneslong-range missiles and nuclear weapons that ldquoour prospectiveenemyrdquo might at any time hurl without warning Big steel needed acomplete control center one linked by telegraph and radio to the steel-making plants Admiral Moreell and his fellow advisers emphasizedthe proximate danger of Russians with H-bombs and in fact asMoreell noted they had one just a few days after his committee laid itsreport at Commerce Worriedly the admiral allowed that 75 percent ofAmerican steelmaking capacity could be destroyed by a mere tenhydrogen bombs The councilrsquos recommendation disperse 25 percentof the capacity in such a way that the resulting plants would be splitup into numerous single-function plants providing each plant with atleast three alternative modes for transporting its products It was timeMoreell intoned to take similar measures in a host of other industriesincluding rubber copper glass aluminum textiles automobiles andelectrical products Prepare for real costs for steel alone the disper-sion bill would run to some $10 billion

Moreell ldquoPerhaps I have overemphasized the hazard under whichwe now live I do not believe so The facts which are coming out withrespect to the tactics and policies of the Communist enemy in Chinaand Korea added to what we already know about them justify the con-clusion that we are facing a ruthless adversary who will permit nohumane consideration to inuence his decisions who will strike with-out prior warning and whose ambition is to rule the worldrdquo31

Dispersion might help the admiral concluded Like so much of this lit-

22 Grey Room 04

Opposite top Where the steelindustry is concentrated Source Admiral Ben MoreellldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do toUS Industriesrdquo US News andWorld Report 7 May 1954

Opposite bottom Destroyingsteel Source Moreell ldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do to USIndustriesrdquo

erature issues of protability and patriotism stood side by side and heconcluded under the ag gesturing to the Founding Father ldquoIn timeof peace prepare for warrdquo

Preparations advanced In 1956 Industrial Development a nationalmagazine dedicated to ldquoarea analysis and business site selectionrdquoreported that the Ofce of Area Development had reviewed and approvedsome fty-eight of the self-prepared urban area surveys Money talkedBy mid-June 1955 projects valued at $30 billion had qualied for taxabatements under the program

Take Milwaukee In December 1953 the cityrsquos mayor Frank Zeidlertraveled to the White House where the president addressed some twohundred large-city mayors in stark terms ldquoFor the rst time in historycities have become principal targets for an enemy seeking to conquerour nation The city has moved from a position of support in the rear Ithas moved out into the front linerdquo Immediately Zeidler arrangedto meet with the Wisconsin governor and the mayors of RacineMadison and Green Joining the chorus of civil defense authorities themayors agreed that in the short term they would need plans for rapidevacuation in the event of a nuclear attack at the same time theyneeded to begin longer-term planning for the dispersal of the city By

Galison | War against the Center 23

May 1954 Milwaukee had its report ldquoNew building in the core of anurban target [ought to] be prohibited except when it replaces existingstructures This is intended to halt the pouring of greater target valuesinto areas which are already richly rewarding as targetsrdquo Spreadingindustry wasnrsquot all that the report advocated The new region wouldneed new school districts novel tax structures and alternative typesof local governments Zoning would force dispersal from the centerinstitute bands of open space and deliver industrial plants to hinter-lands deliberately bypassed by major radial or circumferential roads inorder to avoid creating secondary concentrations ldquoThere is little doubtrdquothe reportrsquos author reckoned ldquothat some of [these] measures wouldhave to be fought through the Supreme Court before they were acceptedby allrdquo32 Pressed by national codes taxes defense spending andimprecations by the president on down local and federal authoritiescompeted to outdo the other in the rush away from the targeted center

America was not alone in declaring war on the urban center Canadain the midst of a major effort to plan urban growth in 1956 also begandefensive dispersal The Ofce of the Civil Defence Coordinator in col-laboration with the Defence Research Board and McGill Universityprepared a Guide to Urban Dispersal ldquoDispersal is the characteristicof present day urban growthrdquo the authors asserted Satellite towns andvillages made urban regions the right scale on which to re-think pat-terns of communication government and demography ldquoDefence iscritical In modern warfare the initial blow is struck at the civilian pop-ulation to destroy at a stroke the ability to resist The greatest vulnera-bility lies in urban concentrationmdashthe greatest security would beachieved by urban dispersalrdquo That dispersal would follow a survey ofa ring located an H-bomb radius away from the regional center That is

24 Grey Room 04

where the Guide came in Based in part on a real area and in part ongeneric characteristics the book was a how-to manual for planning thescattering of the urban into the regional Slope of the land location ofwater avenues of communication and transport needs all had to bereckoned The Guide instructed local leaders and planners how to dia-gram all this for their future Satellite towns would perch outside thering of safetymdashtowns that under no circumstances ought to attractmore than forty thousand inhabitants Ultimately government-pro-pelled ldquourban regionsrdquo would replace the ldquoamorphous formrdquo of currentmetropolitan development alleviating social and economic problemswhile securing spatial defense against thermonuclear attack33 City bycity country by country the bomb helped drive dispersion Indeedcoming full circle the Germans already all too familiar with aerialbombardment began preparing for a rain of hydrogen bombsHannover Bremen and Duumlsseldorf issued the rst three analyses andothers would follow Their comprehensive treatments covered the sta-tus of police re hospital postal service and road service followinga nuclear attack34

Preparation for atomic war was certainly on President Dwight DEisenhowerrsquos mind as he strove to resuscitate the long-debated federalhighway system Franklin D Roosevelt had pushed the idea in the1930s not least for its promise of providing jobs Reports rolled in TheBureau of Public Roads undertook one in 1938 and the chairman ofthat organization presided over another called Interregional Highwaysdated 1943 Other reports and standards marched on through the warwith some actually leading to road buildingmdashin 1947 crews began cut-ting the rst miles of interstate highways Still by the time Eisenhowercame into office in January 1953 there were but six thousand or somiles of road improvements actually on the ground (at a cost of nearly$1 billion)

Eisenhower liked highways He had struggled across the country ina motorized convoy back in 1919 an unpleasant sixty-two days of slip-ping on ice sticking in mud breaking into wooden bridges and freez-ing under snow The contrast with Germany was stark As SupremeCommander General Eisenhower had been astonished by the auto-bahns taking particular note of the advantages that road system affordedas he had to move masses of men and mateacuteriel across the conqueredReich ldquoGermany made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons acrossthe landrdquo On July 12 1954 Vice President Richard Nixon facing theconference of state governors at Lake George New York read fromEisenhowerrsquos prepared speech and the message was clear The obso-lete network had to go its antiquated byways were clogging the roadsand courts while leaving a death toll on the citizenry comparable to

Galison | War against the Center 25

Industrial dispersal 1956 Solidcircles show cities where dispersalplans were approved by late 1955dotted circles indicate communi-ties where plans were under prepa-ration Source Theodore K PasmaldquoIndustrial Dispersal 1956rdquo Indus-trial Development The NationalMagazine of Area Analysis andBusiness Site Selection (January-February 1956)

ldquoa bloody warrdquo But Eisenhowerrsquos final jab at the current system wasstark holding up for public contemplation its ldquoappalling inadequaciesto meet the demands of catastrophe or defense should an atomic warcomerdquo35 Radial roads would afford clear routes for city evacuationCircumferential roads Project East River had recommended back in1952 should be encouraged wherever possible to drain industry andpopulation from the dense city centers36 In fact highway designersconsulted with federal civil defense agencies and military plannersaimed for interstate highways that would bypass urban areas to avoidldquoroute[s] that had suffered a direct A-bomb hitrdquo37 It took two years ofpolitical wrangling and it goes without saying that economic housingand non-nuclear forces for the interstate were surely among its powerfulmotors By the end of 1956 the Interstate and Defense Highway Systemhad fundingmdashsome $25 billion of federal support38

3 Distributed KnowledgeBy 1960 the Air Force began dreaming worse nightmares than nuke-ladenbombers bullying their way past ghter defense Atomic strikes againstthe continental United States could be launched with missiles forwhich range of ight was no longer an issue The RAND Corporationmade its mark with contracts to think about this thermonuclear threatfrom the new think tank issued shelves of studies including thefamous (and famously parodied) volume by Herman Kahn On Thermo-nuclear War Just as Kahn stepped into the limelight the much lesswell known Paul Baran an electrical engineer coming from HughesAircraft Companyrsquos systems group joined RAND His job was todevelop a scheme that would ensure the survival of the US telecom-munications infrastructure through a Russian rst strikemdasha vital linknot only for domestic communication but also for command and con-trol His response in a series of papers launched in 1960 was a plan toremove completely critical nodes from the telephone system Like thethree highways many wanted from each dispersed defense plantBaranrsquos vision aimed for safety in redundantly connected spatially dis-tributed mini-centers

Here is how Baran put it in one of his rst papers

The cloud-of-doom attitude that nuclear war spells the end of theearth is slowly lifting from the minds of the many Better quanti-tative estimates of post-attack destruction together with a lessemotional discussion of the alternatives may mark the end of theldquowhat the hellmdashwhatrsquos the userdquo era A new view emerges the pos-sibility of a war exists but there is much that can be done to min-imize the consequences

26 Grey Room 04

De nition of redundancy Paul Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunications I Introductionto Distributed CommunicationsNetworkrdquo RAND Corporationmemorandum RM-3420-PRAugust 1964

Survivable atomic warmdashthe goal of the fteen-year struggle since theSurvey crew picked through the still radioactive rubble at HiroshimaBaran again

If war does not mean the end of the earth in a black and whitemanner then it follows that we should do those things that makethe shade of gray as light as possible to plan now to minimizepotential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permitthe survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstructthe economy swiftly39

That reconstruction demanded the elimination of the hierarchical center alternately referred to over these rst decades of the cold war asthe linchpin the bottleneck and the node

The problem as Baran formulated it did involve new equipment tolabel digitally each packet of information with a ldquotordquo and ldquofromrdquo andthen to route these fragments over diverse paths toward their eventualreassembly on arrival But before anything could be built moved dig-itized or reinforced the conceptual problem required attention Thatreconceptualization now took as it had not before a mathematicalform If nodes were replaced with redundant links how could heexploit the information-theoretic approach of Claude Shannon to countthe surviving paths between points in the array

Here is how Baran reasoned

Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network whichwill allow several hundred major communications stations to talkwith one another after an enemy attack As a criterion of surviv-ability we elect to use the percentage of stations both survivingthe physical attack and remaining in electrical connection withthe largest single group of surviving stations This criterion ischosen as a conservative measure of the ability of the survivingstations to operate together as a coherent entity after the attack40

With the result that a redundancy of at least R = 3would ensure a likely survival rate of nearly 75 percentBaran could now sketch the distributed system thatwould vouchsafe communication after nuclear war

Worst obviously was the centralized node that rep-resented the single critical target This was the situationwith concentrated steel electricity or oil plants it wasthe structure of the hubbed railway system It was inshort the bombing plannerrsquos dream and the bombingvictimrsquos nightmare Decentralized nodes that main-tained a local hierarchical structure were clearly better

Galison | War against the Center 27

a complete grid structure was best of all To a certain extent such gridsstood for the defensive ideal of dispersion more generally By increasingthe number of targets one decreased the likelihood of incapacitationHalting abortive and awkward though it was Baranrsquos scheme (alongwith a similar one developed in England) slowly wended its way throughdifferent incarnations in the ARPANET and Milnet But the elusivegoal all through these decades of distributed communication was a dis-tributed grid or mesh a thrust in the rst instance aimed at removingthe critical node Though in the garb of nuclear survivability the gridmay not appear as the redemptive Internet of our dreams that tech-nology grew directly out of fifteen years of longing for a world stillstanding after thermonuclear war41

4 We Are Become TargetsDuring the years of World War II American and British planners andanalysts learned to see through a bombsight Not in a single glimpsebut in the routine killings and losses that accompanied ever more fre-quently repeated raids Twenty-four hours a day day after day monthafter month year after year the planners and analysts studied andrestudied the interdependencies of the German economy circled tar-gets blasted factories leveled cities analyzed the damage and struckagain Chemicals nitric acid methanol Basic materials rubber steeloil aviation gas Transport systems electrical generators And popula-tion centers area bombing by the combined American and Britishforces killed some 600000 Germans In a war that the Nazis renderedever more vicious even as their defeat seemed inevitable the Americansrsquoearly dreams of precision bombing went by the way Two hundredplanes over Schweinfurt then four hundred but also Hamburg LuumlbeckMuumlnster Berlin Dresden Regensburg year after year Measuring bombloads accuracies reconstruction time 35 ton of bombs per acre toinduce damage of 8 percent delay time for reconstruction two and a

28 Grey Room 04

half months A calculus of fractions probabilities delaysBy the warrsquos end a new category of analyst had come into existence

more often than not social scientists and industrialists but also human-ists diplomats mathematicians and natural scientists Piecing togetherfragments of intelligence examining reconnaissance photographs theypainted an elaborate portrait of a wartime foe By warrsquos end the Surveyanalysts had come to see German and Japanese cities through what onemight call a ldquodestructive functionalismrdquo dependencies leading back-ward they kept hoping to the ever-elusive linchpin that when pulledwould topple the structure Schweinfurt was supposed to be one suchpoint with its all-important bearing factories And after Schweinfurtthere were other ldquobottlenecksrdquo to be targeted other cities other plantsother transshipment points

Perhaps before Hiroshima the bombsight eye had already begun toreect back I donrsquot know But in the atomic rubble as the analysts inter-viewed hundreds of blast survivors and canvassed the broken struc-tures as they methodically noted which kinds of concrete walls stillstood at various radii of destruction they began quite explicitly to seethemselves to see America through the bombardierrsquos eye They beganto wonder what an American city would look like after the bomb hadfallen Returning to the United States and publishing their StrategicBombing Survey things began to look different They began to see them-selves their towns and factories on the crosshairs of radial targetingmaps Far from a technological determinism the all-too material tech-nologies and concepts of self were fully imbricated

One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics launched when NorbertWiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedbackmachine that could be mimicked electronically from there it was a shortstep to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way Then humanphysiology began to appear as a cybernetic system then the humanmind then life then even the world system as a whole42 Somewherein the midst of total war a technocratic vision of a technical EnemyOther rose to become a vision of ourselves It was but a heartbeat beforecybernetics saturated the writings of Gregory Bateson and MargaretMead not to speak of philosophers planners and architects

But the consequence was this Three years before the Russians hadthe bomb in fact before on just about anyonersquos account the cold warhad begun American analysts were already advocating a massive dis-persion of factories and populations against atomic aerial attack

As the cold war arms race accelerated the search for ldquodefense in spacerdquogrew more desperate jet bombers atomic bombs hydrogen bombsintercontinental ballistic missiles With each step more frantic urgingto spread the cities into their ldquomarketing areasrdquo Highway systems

Galison | War against the Center 29

Centralized decentralized and distributed networksSource Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

played the role previously performed by Germans Russians took overthe bombing role from the Allies Those who had used their knowledgeof American industry had planned the strategic bombing of the Axisnow they became the potential bombing victims readying plans to disperse Here is Hurley

To avoid a repetition in this country of the unfortunate experi-ences of the Germans during World War II necessary moves mustbe made before any outbreak of hostilities The Germans enjoyedthe luxury of learning from their mistakes It is highly doubtfulwhether in the atomic age any nation will have the same oppor-tunitymdashone mistake may well be the last30

Dispersal could aid in reconstruction and also preventionmdasha strongernation ldquoprotected in spacerdquo (as the phrase went) would deter any attacker

Admiral Ben Moreell retired from the Navy and in the mid-1950schairman of Jones amp Laughlin Steel Corporation had just presented tothe secretary of commerce the manifesto of the purposes of the Ironand Steel Advisory Council The council had urged a mobilization planfor steel in light of the threat presented by high-speed jet airplaneslong-range missiles and nuclear weapons that ldquoour prospectiveenemyrdquo might at any time hurl without warning Big steel needed acomplete control center one linked by telegraph and radio to the steel-making plants Admiral Moreell and his fellow advisers emphasizedthe proximate danger of Russians with H-bombs and in fact asMoreell noted they had one just a few days after his committee laid itsreport at Commerce Worriedly the admiral allowed that 75 percent ofAmerican steelmaking capacity could be destroyed by a mere tenhydrogen bombs The councilrsquos recommendation disperse 25 percentof the capacity in such a way that the resulting plants would be splitup into numerous single-function plants providing each plant with atleast three alternative modes for transporting its products It was timeMoreell intoned to take similar measures in a host of other industriesincluding rubber copper glass aluminum textiles automobiles andelectrical products Prepare for real costs for steel alone the disper-sion bill would run to some $10 billion

Moreell ldquoPerhaps I have overemphasized the hazard under whichwe now live I do not believe so The facts which are coming out withrespect to the tactics and policies of the Communist enemy in Chinaand Korea added to what we already know about them justify the con-clusion that we are facing a ruthless adversary who will permit nohumane consideration to inuence his decisions who will strike with-out prior warning and whose ambition is to rule the worldrdquo31

Dispersion might help the admiral concluded Like so much of this lit-

22 Grey Room 04

Opposite top Where the steelindustry is concentrated Source Admiral Ben MoreellldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do toUS Industriesrdquo US News andWorld Report 7 May 1954

Opposite bottom Destroyingsteel Source Moreell ldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do to USIndustriesrdquo

erature issues of protability and patriotism stood side by side and heconcluded under the ag gesturing to the Founding Father ldquoIn timeof peace prepare for warrdquo

Preparations advanced In 1956 Industrial Development a nationalmagazine dedicated to ldquoarea analysis and business site selectionrdquoreported that the Ofce of Area Development had reviewed and approvedsome fty-eight of the self-prepared urban area surveys Money talkedBy mid-June 1955 projects valued at $30 billion had qualied for taxabatements under the program

Take Milwaukee In December 1953 the cityrsquos mayor Frank Zeidlertraveled to the White House where the president addressed some twohundred large-city mayors in stark terms ldquoFor the rst time in historycities have become principal targets for an enemy seeking to conquerour nation The city has moved from a position of support in the rear Ithas moved out into the front linerdquo Immediately Zeidler arrangedto meet with the Wisconsin governor and the mayors of RacineMadison and Green Joining the chorus of civil defense authorities themayors agreed that in the short term they would need plans for rapidevacuation in the event of a nuclear attack at the same time theyneeded to begin longer-term planning for the dispersal of the city By

Galison | War against the Center 23

May 1954 Milwaukee had its report ldquoNew building in the core of anurban target [ought to] be prohibited except when it replaces existingstructures This is intended to halt the pouring of greater target valuesinto areas which are already richly rewarding as targetsrdquo Spreadingindustry wasnrsquot all that the report advocated The new region wouldneed new school districts novel tax structures and alternative typesof local governments Zoning would force dispersal from the centerinstitute bands of open space and deliver industrial plants to hinter-lands deliberately bypassed by major radial or circumferential roads inorder to avoid creating secondary concentrations ldquoThere is little doubtrdquothe reportrsquos author reckoned ldquothat some of [these] measures wouldhave to be fought through the Supreme Court before they were acceptedby allrdquo32 Pressed by national codes taxes defense spending andimprecations by the president on down local and federal authoritiescompeted to outdo the other in the rush away from the targeted center

America was not alone in declaring war on the urban center Canadain the midst of a major effort to plan urban growth in 1956 also begandefensive dispersal The Ofce of the Civil Defence Coordinator in col-laboration with the Defence Research Board and McGill Universityprepared a Guide to Urban Dispersal ldquoDispersal is the characteristicof present day urban growthrdquo the authors asserted Satellite towns andvillages made urban regions the right scale on which to re-think pat-terns of communication government and demography ldquoDefence iscritical In modern warfare the initial blow is struck at the civilian pop-ulation to destroy at a stroke the ability to resist The greatest vulnera-bility lies in urban concentrationmdashthe greatest security would beachieved by urban dispersalrdquo That dispersal would follow a survey ofa ring located an H-bomb radius away from the regional center That is

24 Grey Room 04

where the Guide came in Based in part on a real area and in part ongeneric characteristics the book was a how-to manual for planning thescattering of the urban into the regional Slope of the land location ofwater avenues of communication and transport needs all had to bereckoned The Guide instructed local leaders and planners how to dia-gram all this for their future Satellite towns would perch outside thering of safetymdashtowns that under no circumstances ought to attractmore than forty thousand inhabitants Ultimately government-pro-pelled ldquourban regionsrdquo would replace the ldquoamorphous formrdquo of currentmetropolitan development alleviating social and economic problemswhile securing spatial defense against thermonuclear attack33 City bycity country by country the bomb helped drive dispersion Indeedcoming full circle the Germans already all too familiar with aerialbombardment began preparing for a rain of hydrogen bombsHannover Bremen and Duumlsseldorf issued the rst three analyses andothers would follow Their comprehensive treatments covered the sta-tus of police re hospital postal service and road service followinga nuclear attack34

Preparation for atomic war was certainly on President Dwight DEisenhowerrsquos mind as he strove to resuscitate the long-debated federalhighway system Franklin D Roosevelt had pushed the idea in the1930s not least for its promise of providing jobs Reports rolled in TheBureau of Public Roads undertook one in 1938 and the chairman ofthat organization presided over another called Interregional Highwaysdated 1943 Other reports and standards marched on through the warwith some actually leading to road buildingmdashin 1947 crews began cut-ting the rst miles of interstate highways Still by the time Eisenhowercame into office in January 1953 there were but six thousand or somiles of road improvements actually on the ground (at a cost of nearly$1 billion)

Eisenhower liked highways He had struggled across the country ina motorized convoy back in 1919 an unpleasant sixty-two days of slip-ping on ice sticking in mud breaking into wooden bridges and freez-ing under snow The contrast with Germany was stark As SupremeCommander General Eisenhower had been astonished by the auto-bahns taking particular note of the advantages that road system affordedas he had to move masses of men and mateacuteriel across the conqueredReich ldquoGermany made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons acrossthe landrdquo On July 12 1954 Vice President Richard Nixon facing theconference of state governors at Lake George New York read fromEisenhowerrsquos prepared speech and the message was clear The obso-lete network had to go its antiquated byways were clogging the roadsand courts while leaving a death toll on the citizenry comparable to

Galison | War against the Center 25

Industrial dispersal 1956 Solidcircles show cities where dispersalplans were approved by late 1955dotted circles indicate communi-ties where plans were under prepa-ration Source Theodore K PasmaldquoIndustrial Dispersal 1956rdquo Indus-trial Development The NationalMagazine of Area Analysis andBusiness Site Selection (January-February 1956)

ldquoa bloody warrdquo But Eisenhowerrsquos final jab at the current system wasstark holding up for public contemplation its ldquoappalling inadequaciesto meet the demands of catastrophe or defense should an atomic warcomerdquo35 Radial roads would afford clear routes for city evacuationCircumferential roads Project East River had recommended back in1952 should be encouraged wherever possible to drain industry andpopulation from the dense city centers36 In fact highway designersconsulted with federal civil defense agencies and military plannersaimed for interstate highways that would bypass urban areas to avoidldquoroute[s] that had suffered a direct A-bomb hitrdquo37 It took two years ofpolitical wrangling and it goes without saying that economic housingand non-nuclear forces for the interstate were surely among its powerfulmotors By the end of 1956 the Interstate and Defense Highway Systemhad fundingmdashsome $25 billion of federal support38

3 Distributed KnowledgeBy 1960 the Air Force began dreaming worse nightmares than nuke-ladenbombers bullying their way past ghter defense Atomic strikes againstthe continental United States could be launched with missiles forwhich range of ight was no longer an issue The RAND Corporationmade its mark with contracts to think about this thermonuclear threatfrom the new think tank issued shelves of studies including thefamous (and famously parodied) volume by Herman Kahn On Thermo-nuclear War Just as Kahn stepped into the limelight the much lesswell known Paul Baran an electrical engineer coming from HughesAircraft Companyrsquos systems group joined RAND His job was todevelop a scheme that would ensure the survival of the US telecom-munications infrastructure through a Russian rst strikemdasha vital linknot only for domestic communication but also for command and con-trol His response in a series of papers launched in 1960 was a plan toremove completely critical nodes from the telephone system Like thethree highways many wanted from each dispersed defense plantBaranrsquos vision aimed for safety in redundantly connected spatially dis-tributed mini-centers

Here is how Baran put it in one of his rst papers

The cloud-of-doom attitude that nuclear war spells the end of theearth is slowly lifting from the minds of the many Better quanti-tative estimates of post-attack destruction together with a lessemotional discussion of the alternatives may mark the end of theldquowhat the hellmdashwhatrsquos the userdquo era A new view emerges the pos-sibility of a war exists but there is much that can be done to min-imize the consequences

26 Grey Room 04

De nition of redundancy Paul Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunications I Introductionto Distributed CommunicationsNetworkrdquo RAND Corporationmemorandum RM-3420-PRAugust 1964

Survivable atomic warmdashthe goal of the fteen-year struggle since theSurvey crew picked through the still radioactive rubble at HiroshimaBaran again

If war does not mean the end of the earth in a black and whitemanner then it follows that we should do those things that makethe shade of gray as light as possible to plan now to minimizepotential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permitthe survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstructthe economy swiftly39

That reconstruction demanded the elimination of the hierarchical center alternately referred to over these rst decades of the cold war asthe linchpin the bottleneck and the node

The problem as Baran formulated it did involve new equipment tolabel digitally each packet of information with a ldquotordquo and ldquofromrdquo andthen to route these fragments over diverse paths toward their eventualreassembly on arrival But before anything could be built moved dig-itized or reinforced the conceptual problem required attention Thatreconceptualization now took as it had not before a mathematicalform If nodes were replaced with redundant links how could heexploit the information-theoretic approach of Claude Shannon to countthe surviving paths between points in the array

Here is how Baran reasoned

Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network whichwill allow several hundred major communications stations to talkwith one another after an enemy attack As a criterion of surviv-ability we elect to use the percentage of stations both survivingthe physical attack and remaining in electrical connection withthe largest single group of surviving stations This criterion ischosen as a conservative measure of the ability of the survivingstations to operate together as a coherent entity after the attack40

With the result that a redundancy of at least R = 3would ensure a likely survival rate of nearly 75 percentBaran could now sketch the distributed system thatwould vouchsafe communication after nuclear war

Worst obviously was the centralized node that rep-resented the single critical target This was the situationwith concentrated steel electricity or oil plants it wasthe structure of the hubbed railway system It was inshort the bombing plannerrsquos dream and the bombingvictimrsquos nightmare Decentralized nodes that main-tained a local hierarchical structure were clearly better

Galison | War against the Center 27

a complete grid structure was best of all To a certain extent such gridsstood for the defensive ideal of dispersion more generally By increasingthe number of targets one decreased the likelihood of incapacitationHalting abortive and awkward though it was Baranrsquos scheme (alongwith a similar one developed in England) slowly wended its way throughdifferent incarnations in the ARPANET and Milnet But the elusivegoal all through these decades of distributed communication was a dis-tributed grid or mesh a thrust in the rst instance aimed at removingthe critical node Though in the garb of nuclear survivability the gridmay not appear as the redemptive Internet of our dreams that tech-nology grew directly out of fifteen years of longing for a world stillstanding after thermonuclear war41

4 We Are Become TargetsDuring the years of World War II American and British planners andanalysts learned to see through a bombsight Not in a single glimpsebut in the routine killings and losses that accompanied ever more fre-quently repeated raids Twenty-four hours a day day after day monthafter month year after year the planners and analysts studied andrestudied the interdependencies of the German economy circled tar-gets blasted factories leveled cities analyzed the damage and struckagain Chemicals nitric acid methanol Basic materials rubber steeloil aviation gas Transport systems electrical generators And popula-tion centers area bombing by the combined American and Britishforces killed some 600000 Germans In a war that the Nazis renderedever more vicious even as their defeat seemed inevitable the Americansrsquoearly dreams of precision bombing went by the way Two hundredplanes over Schweinfurt then four hundred but also Hamburg LuumlbeckMuumlnster Berlin Dresden Regensburg year after year Measuring bombloads accuracies reconstruction time 35 ton of bombs per acre toinduce damage of 8 percent delay time for reconstruction two and a

28 Grey Room 04

half months A calculus of fractions probabilities delaysBy the warrsquos end a new category of analyst had come into existence

more often than not social scientists and industrialists but also human-ists diplomats mathematicians and natural scientists Piecing togetherfragments of intelligence examining reconnaissance photographs theypainted an elaborate portrait of a wartime foe By warrsquos end the Surveyanalysts had come to see German and Japanese cities through what onemight call a ldquodestructive functionalismrdquo dependencies leading back-ward they kept hoping to the ever-elusive linchpin that when pulledwould topple the structure Schweinfurt was supposed to be one suchpoint with its all-important bearing factories And after Schweinfurtthere were other ldquobottlenecksrdquo to be targeted other cities other plantsother transshipment points

Perhaps before Hiroshima the bombsight eye had already begun toreect back I donrsquot know But in the atomic rubble as the analysts inter-viewed hundreds of blast survivors and canvassed the broken struc-tures as they methodically noted which kinds of concrete walls stillstood at various radii of destruction they began quite explicitly to seethemselves to see America through the bombardierrsquos eye They beganto wonder what an American city would look like after the bomb hadfallen Returning to the United States and publishing their StrategicBombing Survey things began to look different They began to see them-selves their towns and factories on the crosshairs of radial targetingmaps Far from a technological determinism the all-too material tech-nologies and concepts of self were fully imbricated

One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics launched when NorbertWiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedbackmachine that could be mimicked electronically from there it was a shortstep to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way Then humanphysiology began to appear as a cybernetic system then the humanmind then life then even the world system as a whole42 Somewherein the midst of total war a technocratic vision of a technical EnemyOther rose to become a vision of ourselves It was but a heartbeat beforecybernetics saturated the writings of Gregory Bateson and MargaretMead not to speak of philosophers planners and architects

But the consequence was this Three years before the Russians hadthe bomb in fact before on just about anyonersquos account the cold warhad begun American analysts were already advocating a massive dis-persion of factories and populations against atomic aerial attack

As the cold war arms race accelerated the search for ldquodefense in spacerdquogrew more desperate jet bombers atomic bombs hydrogen bombsintercontinental ballistic missiles With each step more frantic urgingto spread the cities into their ldquomarketing areasrdquo Highway systems

Galison | War against the Center 29

Centralized decentralized and distributed networksSource Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

erature issues of protability and patriotism stood side by side and heconcluded under the ag gesturing to the Founding Father ldquoIn timeof peace prepare for warrdquo

Preparations advanced In 1956 Industrial Development a nationalmagazine dedicated to ldquoarea analysis and business site selectionrdquoreported that the Ofce of Area Development had reviewed and approvedsome fty-eight of the self-prepared urban area surveys Money talkedBy mid-June 1955 projects valued at $30 billion had qualied for taxabatements under the program

Take Milwaukee In December 1953 the cityrsquos mayor Frank Zeidlertraveled to the White House where the president addressed some twohundred large-city mayors in stark terms ldquoFor the rst time in historycities have become principal targets for an enemy seeking to conquerour nation The city has moved from a position of support in the rear Ithas moved out into the front linerdquo Immediately Zeidler arrangedto meet with the Wisconsin governor and the mayors of RacineMadison and Green Joining the chorus of civil defense authorities themayors agreed that in the short term they would need plans for rapidevacuation in the event of a nuclear attack at the same time theyneeded to begin longer-term planning for the dispersal of the city By

Galison | War against the Center 23

May 1954 Milwaukee had its report ldquoNew building in the core of anurban target [ought to] be prohibited except when it replaces existingstructures This is intended to halt the pouring of greater target valuesinto areas which are already richly rewarding as targetsrdquo Spreadingindustry wasnrsquot all that the report advocated The new region wouldneed new school districts novel tax structures and alternative typesof local governments Zoning would force dispersal from the centerinstitute bands of open space and deliver industrial plants to hinter-lands deliberately bypassed by major radial or circumferential roads inorder to avoid creating secondary concentrations ldquoThere is little doubtrdquothe reportrsquos author reckoned ldquothat some of [these] measures wouldhave to be fought through the Supreme Court before they were acceptedby allrdquo32 Pressed by national codes taxes defense spending andimprecations by the president on down local and federal authoritiescompeted to outdo the other in the rush away from the targeted center

America was not alone in declaring war on the urban center Canadain the midst of a major effort to plan urban growth in 1956 also begandefensive dispersal The Ofce of the Civil Defence Coordinator in col-laboration with the Defence Research Board and McGill Universityprepared a Guide to Urban Dispersal ldquoDispersal is the characteristicof present day urban growthrdquo the authors asserted Satellite towns andvillages made urban regions the right scale on which to re-think pat-terns of communication government and demography ldquoDefence iscritical In modern warfare the initial blow is struck at the civilian pop-ulation to destroy at a stroke the ability to resist The greatest vulnera-bility lies in urban concentrationmdashthe greatest security would beachieved by urban dispersalrdquo That dispersal would follow a survey ofa ring located an H-bomb radius away from the regional center That is

24 Grey Room 04

where the Guide came in Based in part on a real area and in part ongeneric characteristics the book was a how-to manual for planning thescattering of the urban into the regional Slope of the land location ofwater avenues of communication and transport needs all had to bereckoned The Guide instructed local leaders and planners how to dia-gram all this for their future Satellite towns would perch outside thering of safetymdashtowns that under no circumstances ought to attractmore than forty thousand inhabitants Ultimately government-pro-pelled ldquourban regionsrdquo would replace the ldquoamorphous formrdquo of currentmetropolitan development alleviating social and economic problemswhile securing spatial defense against thermonuclear attack33 City bycity country by country the bomb helped drive dispersion Indeedcoming full circle the Germans already all too familiar with aerialbombardment began preparing for a rain of hydrogen bombsHannover Bremen and Duumlsseldorf issued the rst three analyses andothers would follow Their comprehensive treatments covered the sta-tus of police re hospital postal service and road service followinga nuclear attack34

Preparation for atomic war was certainly on President Dwight DEisenhowerrsquos mind as he strove to resuscitate the long-debated federalhighway system Franklin D Roosevelt had pushed the idea in the1930s not least for its promise of providing jobs Reports rolled in TheBureau of Public Roads undertook one in 1938 and the chairman ofthat organization presided over another called Interregional Highwaysdated 1943 Other reports and standards marched on through the warwith some actually leading to road buildingmdashin 1947 crews began cut-ting the rst miles of interstate highways Still by the time Eisenhowercame into office in January 1953 there were but six thousand or somiles of road improvements actually on the ground (at a cost of nearly$1 billion)

Eisenhower liked highways He had struggled across the country ina motorized convoy back in 1919 an unpleasant sixty-two days of slip-ping on ice sticking in mud breaking into wooden bridges and freez-ing under snow The contrast with Germany was stark As SupremeCommander General Eisenhower had been astonished by the auto-bahns taking particular note of the advantages that road system affordedas he had to move masses of men and mateacuteriel across the conqueredReich ldquoGermany made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons acrossthe landrdquo On July 12 1954 Vice President Richard Nixon facing theconference of state governors at Lake George New York read fromEisenhowerrsquos prepared speech and the message was clear The obso-lete network had to go its antiquated byways were clogging the roadsand courts while leaving a death toll on the citizenry comparable to

Galison | War against the Center 25

Industrial dispersal 1956 Solidcircles show cities where dispersalplans were approved by late 1955dotted circles indicate communi-ties where plans were under prepa-ration Source Theodore K PasmaldquoIndustrial Dispersal 1956rdquo Indus-trial Development The NationalMagazine of Area Analysis andBusiness Site Selection (January-February 1956)

ldquoa bloody warrdquo But Eisenhowerrsquos final jab at the current system wasstark holding up for public contemplation its ldquoappalling inadequaciesto meet the demands of catastrophe or defense should an atomic warcomerdquo35 Radial roads would afford clear routes for city evacuationCircumferential roads Project East River had recommended back in1952 should be encouraged wherever possible to drain industry andpopulation from the dense city centers36 In fact highway designersconsulted with federal civil defense agencies and military plannersaimed for interstate highways that would bypass urban areas to avoidldquoroute[s] that had suffered a direct A-bomb hitrdquo37 It took two years ofpolitical wrangling and it goes without saying that economic housingand non-nuclear forces for the interstate were surely among its powerfulmotors By the end of 1956 the Interstate and Defense Highway Systemhad fundingmdashsome $25 billion of federal support38

3 Distributed KnowledgeBy 1960 the Air Force began dreaming worse nightmares than nuke-ladenbombers bullying their way past ghter defense Atomic strikes againstthe continental United States could be launched with missiles forwhich range of ight was no longer an issue The RAND Corporationmade its mark with contracts to think about this thermonuclear threatfrom the new think tank issued shelves of studies including thefamous (and famously parodied) volume by Herman Kahn On Thermo-nuclear War Just as Kahn stepped into the limelight the much lesswell known Paul Baran an electrical engineer coming from HughesAircraft Companyrsquos systems group joined RAND His job was todevelop a scheme that would ensure the survival of the US telecom-munications infrastructure through a Russian rst strikemdasha vital linknot only for domestic communication but also for command and con-trol His response in a series of papers launched in 1960 was a plan toremove completely critical nodes from the telephone system Like thethree highways many wanted from each dispersed defense plantBaranrsquos vision aimed for safety in redundantly connected spatially dis-tributed mini-centers

Here is how Baran put it in one of his rst papers

The cloud-of-doom attitude that nuclear war spells the end of theearth is slowly lifting from the minds of the many Better quanti-tative estimates of post-attack destruction together with a lessemotional discussion of the alternatives may mark the end of theldquowhat the hellmdashwhatrsquos the userdquo era A new view emerges the pos-sibility of a war exists but there is much that can be done to min-imize the consequences

26 Grey Room 04

De nition of redundancy Paul Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunications I Introductionto Distributed CommunicationsNetworkrdquo RAND Corporationmemorandum RM-3420-PRAugust 1964

Survivable atomic warmdashthe goal of the fteen-year struggle since theSurvey crew picked through the still radioactive rubble at HiroshimaBaran again

If war does not mean the end of the earth in a black and whitemanner then it follows that we should do those things that makethe shade of gray as light as possible to plan now to minimizepotential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permitthe survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstructthe economy swiftly39

That reconstruction demanded the elimination of the hierarchical center alternately referred to over these rst decades of the cold war asthe linchpin the bottleneck and the node

The problem as Baran formulated it did involve new equipment tolabel digitally each packet of information with a ldquotordquo and ldquofromrdquo andthen to route these fragments over diverse paths toward their eventualreassembly on arrival But before anything could be built moved dig-itized or reinforced the conceptual problem required attention Thatreconceptualization now took as it had not before a mathematicalform If nodes were replaced with redundant links how could heexploit the information-theoretic approach of Claude Shannon to countthe surviving paths between points in the array

Here is how Baran reasoned

Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network whichwill allow several hundred major communications stations to talkwith one another after an enemy attack As a criterion of surviv-ability we elect to use the percentage of stations both survivingthe physical attack and remaining in electrical connection withthe largest single group of surviving stations This criterion ischosen as a conservative measure of the ability of the survivingstations to operate together as a coherent entity after the attack40

With the result that a redundancy of at least R = 3would ensure a likely survival rate of nearly 75 percentBaran could now sketch the distributed system thatwould vouchsafe communication after nuclear war

Worst obviously was the centralized node that rep-resented the single critical target This was the situationwith concentrated steel electricity or oil plants it wasthe structure of the hubbed railway system It was inshort the bombing plannerrsquos dream and the bombingvictimrsquos nightmare Decentralized nodes that main-tained a local hierarchical structure were clearly better

Galison | War against the Center 27

a complete grid structure was best of all To a certain extent such gridsstood for the defensive ideal of dispersion more generally By increasingthe number of targets one decreased the likelihood of incapacitationHalting abortive and awkward though it was Baranrsquos scheme (alongwith a similar one developed in England) slowly wended its way throughdifferent incarnations in the ARPANET and Milnet But the elusivegoal all through these decades of distributed communication was a dis-tributed grid or mesh a thrust in the rst instance aimed at removingthe critical node Though in the garb of nuclear survivability the gridmay not appear as the redemptive Internet of our dreams that tech-nology grew directly out of fifteen years of longing for a world stillstanding after thermonuclear war41

4 We Are Become TargetsDuring the years of World War II American and British planners andanalysts learned to see through a bombsight Not in a single glimpsebut in the routine killings and losses that accompanied ever more fre-quently repeated raids Twenty-four hours a day day after day monthafter month year after year the planners and analysts studied andrestudied the interdependencies of the German economy circled tar-gets blasted factories leveled cities analyzed the damage and struckagain Chemicals nitric acid methanol Basic materials rubber steeloil aviation gas Transport systems electrical generators And popula-tion centers area bombing by the combined American and Britishforces killed some 600000 Germans In a war that the Nazis renderedever more vicious even as their defeat seemed inevitable the Americansrsquoearly dreams of precision bombing went by the way Two hundredplanes over Schweinfurt then four hundred but also Hamburg LuumlbeckMuumlnster Berlin Dresden Regensburg year after year Measuring bombloads accuracies reconstruction time 35 ton of bombs per acre toinduce damage of 8 percent delay time for reconstruction two and a

28 Grey Room 04

half months A calculus of fractions probabilities delaysBy the warrsquos end a new category of analyst had come into existence

more often than not social scientists and industrialists but also human-ists diplomats mathematicians and natural scientists Piecing togetherfragments of intelligence examining reconnaissance photographs theypainted an elaborate portrait of a wartime foe By warrsquos end the Surveyanalysts had come to see German and Japanese cities through what onemight call a ldquodestructive functionalismrdquo dependencies leading back-ward they kept hoping to the ever-elusive linchpin that when pulledwould topple the structure Schweinfurt was supposed to be one suchpoint with its all-important bearing factories And after Schweinfurtthere were other ldquobottlenecksrdquo to be targeted other cities other plantsother transshipment points

Perhaps before Hiroshima the bombsight eye had already begun toreect back I donrsquot know But in the atomic rubble as the analysts inter-viewed hundreds of blast survivors and canvassed the broken struc-tures as they methodically noted which kinds of concrete walls stillstood at various radii of destruction they began quite explicitly to seethemselves to see America through the bombardierrsquos eye They beganto wonder what an American city would look like after the bomb hadfallen Returning to the United States and publishing their StrategicBombing Survey things began to look different They began to see them-selves their towns and factories on the crosshairs of radial targetingmaps Far from a technological determinism the all-too material tech-nologies and concepts of self were fully imbricated

One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics launched when NorbertWiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedbackmachine that could be mimicked electronically from there it was a shortstep to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way Then humanphysiology began to appear as a cybernetic system then the humanmind then life then even the world system as a whole42 Somewherein the midst of total war a technocratic vision of a technical EnemyOther rose to become a vision of ourselves It was but a heartbeat beforecybernetics saturated the writings of Gregory Bateson and MargaretMead not to speak of philosophers planners and architects

But the consequence was this Three years before the Russians hadthe bomb in fact before on just about anyonersquos account the cold warhad begun American analysts were already advocating a massive dis-persion of factories and populations against atomic aerial attack

As the cold war arms race accelerated the search for ldquodefense in spacerdquogrew more desperate jet bombers atomic bombs hydrogen bombsintercontinental ballistic missiles With each step more frantic urgingto spread the cities into their ldquomarketing areasrdquo Highway systems

Galison | War against the Center 29

Centralized decentralized and distributed networksSource Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

May 1954 Milwaukee had its report ldquoNew building in the core of anurban target [ought to] be prohibited except when it replaces existingstructures This is intended to halt the pouring of greater target valuesinto areas which are already richly rewarding as targetsrdquo Spreadingindustry wasnrsquot all that the report advocated The new region wouldneed new school districts novel tax structures and alternative typesof local governments Zoning would force dispersal from the centerinstitute bands of open space and deliver industrial plants to hinter-lands deliberately bypassed by major radial or circumferential roads inorder to avoid creating secondary concentrations ldquoThere is little doubtrdquothe reportrsquos author reckoned ldquothat some of [these] measures wouldhave to be fought through the Supreme Court before they were acceptedby allrdquo32 Pressed by national codes taxes defense spending andimprecations by the president on down local and federal authoritiescompeted to outdo the other in the rush away from the targeted center

America was not alone in declaring war on the urban center Canadain the midst of a major effort to plan urban growth in 1956 also begandefensive dispersal The Ofce of the Civil Defence Coordinator in col-laboration with the Defence Research Board and McGill Universityprepared a Guide to Urban Dispersal ldquoDispersal is the characteristicof present day urban growthrdquo the authors asserted Satellite towns andvillages made urban regions the right scale on which to re-think pat-terns of communication government and demography ldquoDefence iscritical In modern warfare the initial blow is struck at the civilian pop-ulation to destroy at a stroke the ability to resist The greatest vulnera-bility lies in urban concentrationmdashthe greatest security would beachieved by urban dispersalrdquo That dispersal would follow a survey ofa ring located an H-bomb radius away from the regional center That is

24 Grey Room 04

where the Guide came in Based in part on a real area and in part ongeneric characteristics the book was a how-to manual for planning thescattering of the urban into the regional Slope of the land location ofwater avenues of communication and transport needs all had to bereckoned The Guide instructed local leaders and planners how to dia-gram all this for their future Satellite towns would perch outside thering of safetymdashtowns that under no circumstances ought to attractmore than forty thousand inhabitants Ultimately government-pro-pelled ldquourban regionsrdquo would replace the ldquoamorphous formrdquo of currentmetropolitan development alleviating social and economic problemswhile securing spatial defense against thermonuclear attack33 City bycity country by country the bomb helped drive dispersion Indeedcoming full circle the Germans already all too familiar with aerialbombardment began preparing for a rain of hydrogen bombsHannover Bremen and Duumlsseldorf issued the rst three analyses andothers would follow Their comprehensive treatments covered the sta-tus of police re hospital postal service and road service followinga nuclear attack34

Preparation for atomic war was certainly on President Dwight DEisenhowerrsquos mind as he strove to resuscitate the long-debated federalhighway system Franklin D Roosevelt had pushed the idea in the1930s not least for its promise of providing jobs Reports rolled in TheBureau of Public Roads undertook one in 1938 and the chairman ofthat organization presided over another called Interregional Highwaysdated 1943 Other reports and standards marched on through the warwith some actually leading to road buildingmdashin 1947 crews began cut-ting the rst miles of interstate highways Still by the time Eisenhowercame into office in January 1953 there were but six thousand or somiles of road improvements actually on the ground (at a cost of nearly$1 billion)

Eisenhower liked highways He had struggled across the country ina motorized convoy back in 1919 an unpleasant sixty-two days of slip-ping on ice sticking in mud breaking into wooden bridges and freez-ing under snow The contrast with Germany was stark As SupremeCommander General Eisenhower had been astonished by the auto-bahns taking particular note of the advantages that road system affordedas he had to move masses of men and mateacuteriel across the conqueredReich ldquoGermany made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons acrossthe landrdquo On July 12 1954 Vice President Richard Nixon facing theconference of state governors at Lake George New York read fromEisenhowerrsquos prepared speech and the message was clear The obso-lete network had to go its antiquated byways were clogging the roadsand courts while leaving a death toll on the citizenry comparable to

Galison | War against the Center 25

Industrial dispersal 1956 Solidcircles show cities where dispersalplans were approved by late 1955dotted circles indicate communi-ties where plans were under prepa-ration Source Theodore K PasmaldquoIndustrial Dispersal 1956rdquo Indus-trial Development The NationalMagazine of Area Analysis andBusiness Site Selection (January-February 1956)

ldquoa bloody warrdquo But Eisenhowerrsquos final jab at the current system wasstark holding up for public contemplation its ldquoappalling inadequaciesto meet the demands of catastrophe or defense should an atomic warcomerdquo35 Radial roads would afford clear routes for city evacuationCircumferential roads Project East River had recommended back in1952 should be encouraged wherever possible to drain industry andpopulation from the dense city centers36 In fact highway designersconsulted with federal civil defense agencies and military plannersaimed for interstate highways that would bypass urban areas to avoidldquoroute[s] that had suffered a direct A-bomb hitrdquo37 It took two years ofpolitical wrangling and it goes without saying that economic housingand non-nuclear forces for the interstate were surely among its powerfulmotors By the end of 1956 the Interstate and Defense Highway Systemhad fundingmdashsome $25 billion of federal support38

3 Distributed KnowledgeBy 1960 the Air Force began dreaming worse nightmares than nuke-ladenbombers bullying their way past ghter defense Atomic strikes againstthe continental United States could be launched with missiles forwhich range of ight was no longer an issue The RAND Corporationmade its mark with contracts to think about this thermonuclear threatfrom the new think tank issued shelves of studies including thefamous (and famously parodied) volume by Herman Kahn On Thermo-nuclear War Just as Kahn stepped into the limelight the much lesswell known Paul Baran an electrical engineer coming from HughesAircraft Companyrsquos systems group joined RAND His job was todevelop a scheme that would ensure the survival of the US telecom-munications infrastructure through a Russian rst strikemdasha vital linknot only for domestic communication but also for command and con-trol His response in a series of papers launched in 1960 was a plan toremove completely critical nodes from the telephone system Like thethree highways many wanted from each dispersed defense plantBaranrsquos vision aimed for safety in redundantly connected spatially dis-tributed mini-centers

Here is how Baran put it in one of his rst papers

The cloud-of-doom attitude that nuclear war spells the end of theearth is slowly lifting from the minds of the many Better quanti-tative estimates of post-attack destruction together with a lessemotional discussion of the alternatives may mark the end of theldquowhat the hellmdashwhatrsquos the userdquo era A new view emerges the pos-sibility of a war exists but there is much that can be done to min-imize the consequences

26 Grey Room 04

De nition of redundancy Paul Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunications I Introductionto Distributed CommunicationsNetworkrdquo RAND Corporationmemorandum RM-3420-PRAugust 1964

Survivable atomic warmdashthe goal of the fteen-year struggle since theSurvey crew picked through the still radioactive rubble at HiroshimaBaran again

If war does not mean the end of the earth in a black and whitemanner then it follows that we should do those things that makethe shade of gray as light as possible to plan now to minimizepotential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permitthe survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstructthe economy swiftly39

That reconstruction demanded the elimination of the hierarchical center alternately referred to over these rst decades of the cold war asthe linchpin the bottleneck and the node

The problem as Baran formulated it did involve new equipment tolabel digitally each packet of information with a ldquotordquo and ldquofromrdquo andthen to route these fragments over diverse paths toward their eventualreassembly on arrival But before anything could be built moved dig-itized or reinforced the conceptual problem required attention Thatreconceptualization now took as it had not before a mathematicalform If nodes were replaced with redundant links how could heexploit the information-theoretic approach of Claude Shannon to countthe surviving paths between points in the array

Here is how Baran reasoned

Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network whichwill allow several hundred major communications stations to talkwith one another after an enemy attack As a criterion of surviv-ability we elect to use the percentage of stations both survivingthe physical attack and remaining in electrical connection withthe largest single group of surviving stations This criterion ischosen as a conservative measure of the ability of the survivingstations to operate together as a coherent entity after the attack40

With the result that a redundancy of at least R = 3would ensure a likely survival rate of nearly 75 percentBaran could now sketch the distributed system thatwould vouchsafe communication after nuclear war

Worst obviously was the centralized node that rep-resented the single critical target This was the situationwith concentrated steel electricity or oil plants it wasthe structure of the hubbed railway system It was inshort the bombing plannerrsquos dream and the bombingvictimrsquos nightmare Decentralized nodes that main-tained a local hierarchical structure were clearly better

Galison | War against the Center 27

a complete grid structure was best of all To a certain extent such gridsstood for the defensive ideal of dispersion more generally By increasingthe number of targets one decreased the likelihood of incapacitationHalting abortive and awkward though it was Baranrsquos scheme (alongwith a similar one developed in England) slowly wended its way throughdifferent incarnations in the ARPANET and Milnet But the elusivegoal all through these decades of distributed communication was a dis-tributed grid or mesh a thrust in the rst instance aimed at removingthe critical node Though in the garb of nuclear survivability the gridmay not appear as the redemptive Internet of our dreams that tech-nology grew directly out of fifteen years of longing for a world stillstanding after thermonuclear war41

4 We Are Become TargetsDuring the years of World War II American and British planners andanalysts learned to see through a bombsight Not in a single glimpsebut in the routine killings and losses that accompanied ever more fre-quently repeated raids Twenty-four hours a day day after day monthafter month year after year the planners and analysts studied andrestudied the interdependencies of the German economy circled tar-gets blasted factories leveled cities analyzed the damage and struckagain Chemicals nitric acid methanol Basic materials rubber steeloil aviation gas Transport systems electrical generators And popula-tion centers area bombing by the combined American and Britishforces killed some 600000 Germans In a war that the Nazis renderedever more vicious even as their defeat seemed inevitable the Americansrsquoearly dreams of precision bombing went by the way Two hundredplanes over Schweinfurt then four hundred but also Hamburg LuumlbeckMuumlnster Berlin Dresden Regensburg year after year Measuring bombloads accuracies reconstruction time 35 ton of bombs per acre toinduce damage of 8 percent delay time for reconstruction two and a

28 Grey Room 04

half months A calculus of fractions probabilities delaysBy the warrsquos end a new category of analyst had come into existence

more often than not social scientists and industrialists but also human-ists diplomats mathematicians and natural scientists Piecing togetherfragments of intelligence examining reconnaissance photographs theypainted an elaborate portrait of a wartime foe By warrsquos end the Surveyanalysts had come to see German and Japanese cities through what onemight call a ldquodestructive functionalismrdquo dependencies leading back-ward they kept hoping to the ever-elusive linchpin that when pulledwould topple the structure Schweinfurt was supposed to be one suchpoint with its all-important bearing factories And after Schweinfurtthere were other ldquobottlenecksrdquo to be targeted other cities other plantsother transshipment points

Perhaps before Hiroshima the bombsight eye had already begun toreect back I donrsquot know But in the atomic rubble as the analysts inter-viewed hundreds of blast survivors and canvassed the broken struc-tures as they methodically noted which kinds of concrete walls stillstood at various radii of destruction they began quite explicitly to seethemselves to see America through the bombardierrsquos eye They beganto wonder what an American city would look like after the bomb hadfallen Returning to the United States and publishing their StrategicBombing Survey things began to look different They began to see them-selves their towns and factories on the crosshairs of radial targetingmaps Far from a technological determinism the all-too material tech-nologies and concepts of self were fully imbricated

One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics launched when NorbertWiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedbackmachine that could be mimicked electronically from there it was a shortstep to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way Then humanphysiology began to appear as a cybernetic system then the humanmind then life then even the world system as a whole42 Somewherein the midst of total war a technocratic vision of a technical EnemyOther rose to become a vision of ourselves It was but a heartbeat beforecybernetics saturated the writings of Gregory Bateson and MargaretMead not to speak of philosophers planners and architects

But the consequence was this Three years before the Russians hadthe bomb in fact before on just about anyonersquos account the cold warhad begun American analysts were already advocating a massive dis-persion of factories and populations against atomic aerial attack

As the cold war arms race accelerated the search for ldquodefense in spacerdquogrew more desperate jet bombers atomic bombs hydrogen bombsintercontinental ballistic missiles With each step more frantic urgingto spread the cities into their ldquomarketing areasrdquo Highway systems

Galison | War against the Center 29

Centralized decentralized and distributed networksSource Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

where the Guide came in Based in part on a real area and in part ongeneric characteristics the book was a how-to manual for planning thescattering of the urban into the regional Slope of the land location ofwater avenues of communication and transport needs all had to bereckoned The Guide instructed local leaders and planners how to dia-gram all this for their future Satellite towns would perch outside thering of safetymdashtowns that under no circumstances ought to attractmore than forty thousand inhabitants Ultimately government-pro-pelled ldquourban regionsrdquo would replace the ldquoamorphous formrdquo of currentmetropolitan development alleviating social and economic problemswhile securing spatial defense against thermonuclear attack33 City bycity country by country the bomb helped drive dispersion Indeedcoming full circle the Germans already all too familiar with aerialbombardment began preparing for a rain of hydrogen bombsHannover Bremen and Duumlsseldorf issued the rst three analyses andothers would follow Their comprehensive treatments covered the sta-tus of police re hospital postal service and road service followinga nuclear attack34

Preparation for atomic war was certainly on President Dwight DEisenhowerrsquos mind as he strove to resuscitate the long-debated federalhighway system Franklin D Roosevelt had pushed the idea in the1930s not least for its promise of providing jobs Reports rolled in TheBureau of Public Roads undertook one in 1938 and the chairman ofthat organization presided over another called Interregional Highwaysdated 1943 Other reports and standards marched on through the warwith some actually leading to road buildingmdashin 1947 crews began cut-ting the rst miles of interstate highways Still by the time Eisenhowercame into office in January 1953 there were but six thousand or somiles of road improvements actually on the ground (at a cost of nearly$1 billion)

Eisenhower liked highways He had struggled across the country ina motorized convoy back in 1919 an unpleasant sixty-two days of slip-ping on ice sticking in mud breaking into wooden bridges and freez-ing under snow The contrast with Germany was stark As SupremeCommander General Eisenhower had been astonished by the auto-bahns taking particular note of the advantages that road system affordedas he had to move masses of men and mateacuteriel across the conqueredReich ldquoGermany made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons acrossthe landrdquo On July 12 1954 Vice President Richard Nixon facing theconference of state governors at Lake George New York read fromEisenhowerrsquos prepared speech and the message was clear The obso-lete network had to go its antiquated byways were clogging the roadsand courts while leaving a death toll on the citizenry comparable to

Galison | War against the Center 25

Industrial dispersal 1956 Solidcircles show cities where dispersalplans were approved by late 1955dotted circles indicate communi-ties where plans were under prepa-ration Source Theodore K PasmaldquoIndustrial Dispersal 1956rdquo Indus-trial Development The NationalMagazine of Area Analysis andBusiness Site Selection (January-February 1956)

ldquoa bloody warrdquo But Eisenhowerrsquos final jab at the current system wasstark holding up for public contemplation its ldquoappalling inadequaciesto meet the demands of catastrophe or defense should an atomic warcomerdquo35 Radial roads would afford clear routes for city evacuationCircumferential roads Project East River had recommended back in1952 should be encouraged wherever possible to drain industry andpopulation from the dense city centers36 In fact highway designersconsulted with federal civil defense agencies and military plannersaimed for interstate highways that would bypass urban areas to avoidldquoroute[s] that had suffered a direct A-bomb hitrdquo37 It took two years ofpolitical wrangling and it goes without saying that economic housingand non-nuclear forces for the interstate were surely among its powerfulmotors By the end of 1956 the Interstate and Defense Highway Systemhad fundingmdashsome $25 billion of federal support38

3 Distributed KnowledgeBy 1960 the Air Force began dreaming worse nightmares than nuke-ladenbombers bullying their way past ghter defense Atomic strikes againstthe continental United States could be launched with missiles forwhich range of ight was no longer an issue The RAND Corporationmade its mark with contracts to think about this thermonuclear threatfrom the new think tank issued shelves of studies including thefamous (and famously parodied) volume by Herman Kahn On Thermo-nuclear War Just as Kahn stepped into the limelight the much lesswell known Paul Baran an electrical engineer coming from HughesAircraft Companyrsquos systems group joined RAND His job was todevelop a scheme that would ensure the survival of the US telecom-munications infrastructure through a Russian rst strikemdasha vital linknot only for domestic communication but also for command and con-trol His response in a series of papers launched in 1960 was a plan toremove completely critical nodes from the telephone system Like thethree highways many wanted from each dispersed defense plantBaranrsquos vision aimed for safety in redundantly connected spatially dis-tributed mini-centers

Here is how Baran put it in one of his rst papers

The cloud-of-doom attitude that nuclear war spells the end of theearth is slowly lifting from the minds of the many Better quanti-tative estimates of post-attack destruction together with a lessemotional discussion of the alternatives may mark the end of theldquowhat the hellmdashwhatrsquos the userdquo era A new view emerges the pos-sibility of a war exists but there is much that can be done to min-imize the consequences

26 Grey Room 04

De nition of redundancy Paul Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunications I Introductionto Distributed CommunicationsNetworkrdquo RAND Corporationmemorandum RM-3420-PRAugust 1964

Survivable atomic warmdashthe goal of the fteen-year struggle since theSurvey crew picked through the still radioactive rubble at HiroshimaBaran again

If war does not mean the end of the earth in a black and whitemanner then it follows that we should do those things that makethe shade of gray as light as possible to plan now to minimizepotential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permitthe survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstructthe economy swiftly39

That reconstruction demanded the elimination of the hierarchical center alternately referred to over these rst decades of the cold war asthe linchpin the bottleneck and the node

The problem as Baran formulated it did involve new equipment tolabel digitally each packet of information with a ldquotordquo and ldquofromrdquo andthen to route these fragments over diverse paths toward their eventualreassembly on arrival But before anything could be built moved dig-itized or reinforced the conceptual problem required attention Thatreconceptualization now took as it had not before a mathematicalform If nodes were replaced with redundant links how could heexploit the information-theoretic approach of Claude Shannon to countthe surviving paths between points in the array

Here is how Baran reasoned

Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network whichwill allow several hundred major communications stations to talkwith one another after an enemy attack As a criterion of surviv-ability we elect to use the percentage of stations both survivingthe physical attack and remaining in electrical connection withthe largest single group of surviving stations This criterion ischosen as a conservative measure of the ability of the survivingstations to operate together as a coherent entity after the attack40

With the result that a redundancy of at least R = 3would ensure a likely survival rate of nearly 75 percentBaran could now sketch the distributed system thatwould vouchsafe communication after nuclear war

Worst obviously was the centralized node that rep-resented the single critical target This was the situationwith concentrated steel electricity or oil plants it wasthe structure of the hubbed railway system It was inshort the bombing plannerrsquos dream and the bombingvictimrsquos nightmare Decentralized nodes that main-tained a local hierarchical structure were clearly better

Galison | War against the Center 27

a complete grid structure was best of all To a certain extent such gridsstood for the defensive ideal of dispersion more generally By increasingthe number of targets one decreased the likelihood of incapacitationHalting abortive and awkward though it was Baranrsquos scheme (alongwith a similar one developed in England) slowly wended its way throughdifferent incarnations in the ARPANET and Milnet But the elusivegoal all through these decades of distributed communication was a dis-tributed grid or mesh a thrust in the rst instance aimed at removingthe critical node Though in the garb of nuclear survivability the gridmay not appear as the redemptive Internet of our dreams that tech-nology grew directly out of fifteen years of longing for a world stillstanding after thermonuclear war41

4 We Are Become TargetsDuring the years of World War II American and British planners andanalysts learned to see through a bombsight Not in a single glimpsebut in the routine killings and losses that accompanied ever more fre-quently repeated raids Twenty-four hours a day day after day monthafter month year after year the planners and analysts studied andrestudied the interdependencies of the German economy circled tar-gets blasted factories leveled cities analyzed the damage and struckagain Chemicals nitric acid methanol Basic materials rubber steeloil aviation gas Transport systems electrical generators And popula-tion centers area bombing by the combined American and Britishforces killed some 600000 Germans In a war that the Nazis renderedever more vicious even as their defeat seemed inevitable the Americansrsquoearly dreams of precision bombing went by the way Two hundredplanes over Schweinfurt then four hundred but also Hamburg LuumlbeckMuumlnster Berlin Dresden Regensburg year after year Measuring bombloads accuracies reconstruction time 35 ton of bombs per acre toinduce damage of 8 percent delay time for reconstruction two and a

28 Grey Room 04

half months A calculus of fractions probabilities delaysBy the warrsquos end a new category of analyst had come into existence

more often than not social scientists and industrialists but also human-ists diplomats mathematicians and natural scientists Piecing togetherfragments of intelligence examining reconnaissance photographs theypainted an elaborate portrait of a wartime foe By warrsquos end the Surveyanalysts had come to see German and Japanese cities through what onemight call a ldquodestructive functionalismrdquo dependencies leading back-ward they kept hoping to the ever-elusive linchpin that when pulledwould topple the structure Schweinfurt was supposed to be one suchpoint with its all-important bearing factories And after Schweinfurtthere were other ldquobottlenecksrdquo to be targeted other cities other plantsother transshipment points

Perhaps before Hiroshima the bombsight eye had already begun toreect back I donrsquot know But in the atomic rubble as the analysts inter-viewed hundreds of blast survivors and canvassed the broken struc-tures as they methodically noted which kinds of concrete walls stillstood at various radii of destruction they began quite explicitly to seethemselves to see America through the bombardierrsquos eye They beganto wonder what an American city would look like after the bomb hadfallen Returning to the United States and publishing their StrategicBombing Survey things began to look different They began to see them-selves their towns and factories on the crosshairs of radial targetingmaps Far from a technological determinism the all-too material tech-nologies and concepts of self were fully imbricated

One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics launched when NorbertWiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedbackmachine that could be mimicked electronically from there it was a shortstep to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way Then humanphysiology began to appear as a cybernetic system then the humanmind then life then even the world system as a whole42 Somewherein the midst of total war a technocratic vision of a technical EnemyOther rose to become a vision of ourselves It was but a heartbeat beforecybernetics saturated the writings of Gregory Bateson and MargaretMead not to speak of philosophers planners and architects

But the consequence was this Three years before the Russians hadthe bomb in fact before on just about anyonersquos account the cold warhad begun American analysts were already advocating a massive dis-persion of factories and populations against atomic aerial attack

As the cold war arms race accelerated the search for ldquodefense in spacerdquogrew more desperate jet bombers atomic bombs hydrogen bombsintercontinental ballistic missiles With each step more frantic urgingto spread the cities into their ldquomarketing areasrdquo Highway systems

Galison | War against the Center 29

Centralized decentralized and distributed networksSource Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

ldquoa bloody warrdquo But Eisenhowerrsquos final jab at the current system wasstark holding up for public contemplation its ldquoappalling inadequaciesto meet the demands of catastrophe or defense should an atomic warcomerdquo35 Radial roads would afford clear routes for city evacuationCircumferential roads Project East River had recommended back in1952 should be encouraged wherever possible to drain industry andpopulation from the dense city centers36 In fact highway designersconsulted with federal civil defense agencies and military plannersaimed for interstate highways that would bypass urban areas to avoidldquoroute[s] that had suffered a direct A-bomb hitrdquo37 It took two years ofpolitical wrangling and it goes without saying that economic housingand non-nuclear forces for the interstate were surely among its powerfulmotors By the end of 1956 the Interstate and Defense Highway Systemhad fundingmdashsome $25 billion of federal support38

3 Distributed KnowledgeBy 1960 the Air Force began dreaming worse nightmares than nuke-ladenbombers bullying their way past ghter defense Atomic strikes againstthe continental United States could be launched with missiles forwhich range of ight was no longer an issue The RAND Corporationmade its mark with contracts to think about this thermonuclear threatfrom the new think tank issued shelves of studies including thefamous (and famously parodied) volume by Herman Kahn On Thermo-nuclear War Just as Kahn stepped into the limelight the much lesswell known Paul Baran an electrical engineer coming from HughesAircraft Companyrsquos systems group joined RAND His job was todevelop a scheme that would ensure the survival of the US telecom-munications infrastructure through a Russian rst strikemdasha vital linknot only for domestic communication but also for command and con-trol His response in a series of papers launched in 1960 was a plan toremove completely critical nodes from the telephone system Like thethree highways many wanted from each dispersed defense plantBaranrsquos vision aimed for safety in redundantly connected spatially dis-tributed mini-centers

Here is how Baran put it in one of his rst papers

The cloud-of-doom attitude that nuclear war spells the end of theearth is slowly lifting from the minds of the many Better quanti-tative estimates of post-attack destruction together with a lessemotional discussion of the alternatives may mark the end of theldquowhat the hellmdashwhatrsquos the userdquo era A new view emerges the pos-sibility of a war exists but there is much that can be done to min-imize the consequences

26 Grey Room 04

De nition of redundancy Paul Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunications I Introductionto Distributed CommunicationsNetworkrdquo RAND Corporationmemorandum RM-3420-PRAugust 1964

Survivable atomic warmdashthe goal of the fteen-year struggle since theSurvey crew picked through the still radioactive rubble at HiroshimaBaran again

If war does not mean the end of the earth in a black and whitemanner then it follows that we should do those things that makethe shade of gray as light as possible to plan now to minimizepotential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permitthe survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstructthe economy swiftly39

That reconstruction demanded the elimination of the hierarchical center alternately referred to over these rst decades of the cold war asthe linchpin the bottleneck and the node

The problem as Baran formulated it did involve new equipment tolabel digitally each packet of information with a ldquotordquo and ldquofromrdquo andthen to route these fragments over diverse paths toward their eventualreassembly on arrival But before anything could be built moved dig-itized or reinforced the conceptual problem required attention Thatreconceptualization now took as it had not before a mathematicalform If nodes were replaced with redundant links how could heexploit the information-theoretic approach of Claude Shannon to countthe surviving paths between points in the array

Here is how Baran reasoned

Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network whichwill allow several hundred major communications stations to talkwith one another after an enemy attack As a criterion of surviv-ability we elect to use the percentage of stations both survivingthe physical attack and remaining in electrical connection withthe largest single group of surviving stations This criterion ischosen as a conservative measure of the ability of the survivingstations to operate together as a coherent entity after the attack40

With the result that a redundancy of at least R = 3would ensure a likely survival rate of nearly 75 percentBaran could now sketch the distributed system thatwould vouchsafe communication after nuclear war

Worst obviously was the centralized node that rep-resented the single critical target This was the situationwith concentrated steel electricity or oil plants it wasthe structure of the hubbed railway system It was inshort the bombing plannerrsquos dream and the bombingvictimrsquos nightmare Decentralized nodes that main-tained a local hierarchical structure were clearly better

Galison | War against the Center 27

a complete grid structure was best of all To a certain extent such gridsstood for the defensive ideal of dispersion more generally By increasingthe number of targets one decreased the likelihood of incapacitationHalting abortive and awkward though it was Baranrsquos scheme (alongwith a similar one developed in England) slowly wended its way throughdifferent incarnations in the ARPANET and Milnet But the elusivegoal all through these decades of distributed communication was a dis-tributed grid or mesh a thrust in the rst instance aimed at removingthe critical node Though in the garb of nuclear survivability the gridmay not appear as the redemptive Internet of our dreams that tech-nology grew directly out of fifteen years of longing for a world stillstanding after thermonuclear war41

4 We Are Become TargetsDuring the years of World War II American and British planners andanalysts learned to see through a bombsight Not in a single glimpsebut in the routine killings and losses that accompanied ever more fre-quently repeated raids Twenty-four hours a day day after day monthafter month year after year the planners and analysts studied andrestudied the interdependencies of the German economy circled tar-gets blasted factories leveled cities analyzed the damage and struckagain Chemicals nitric acid methanol Basic materials rubber steeloil aviation gas Transport systems electrical generators And popula-tion centers area bombing by the combined American and Britishforces killed some 600000 Germans In a war that the Nazis renderedever more vicious even as their defeat seemed inevitable the Americansrsquoearly dreams of precision bombing went by the way Two hundredplanes over Schweinfurt then four hundred but also Hamburg LuumlbeckMuumlnster Berlin Dresden Regensburg year after year Measuring bombloads accuracies reconstruction time 35 ton of bombs per acre toinduce damage of 8 percent delay time for reconstruction two and a

28 Grey Room 04

half months A calculus of fractions probabilities delaysBy the warrsquos end a new category of analyst had come into existence

more often than not social scientists and industrialists but also human-ists diplomats mathematicians and natural scientists Piecing togetherfragments of intelligence examining reconnaissance photographs theypainted an elaborate portrait of a wartime foe By warrsquos end the Surveyanalysts had come to see German and Japanese cities through what onemight call a ldquodestructive functionalismrdquo dependencies leading back-ward they kept hoping to the ever-elusive linchpin that when pulledwould topple the structure Schweinfurt was supposed to be one suchpoint with its all-important bearing factories And after Schweinfurtthere were other ldquobottlenecksrdquo to be targeted other cities other plantsother transshipment points

Perhaps before Hiroshima the bombsight eye had already begun toreect back I donrsquot know But in the atomic rubble as the analysts inter-viewed hundreds of blast survivors and canvassed the broken struc-tures as they methodically noted which kinds of concrete walls stillstood at various radii of destruction they began quite explicitly to seethemselves to see America through the bombardierrsquos eye They beganto wonder what an American city would look like after the bomb hadfallen Returning to the United States and publishing their StrategicBombing Survey things began to look different They began to see them-selves their towns and factories on the crosshairs of radial targetingmaps Far from a technological determinism the all-too material tech-nologies and concepts of self were fully imbricated

One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics launched when NorbertWiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedbackmachine that could be mimicked electronically from there it was a shortstep to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way Then humanphysiology began to appear as a cybernetic system then the humanmind then life then even the world system as a whole42 Somewherein the midst of total war a technocratic vision of a technical EnemyOther rose to become a vision of ourselves It was but a heartbeat beforecybernetics saturated the writings of Gregory Bateson and MargaretMead not to speak of philosophers planners and architects

But the consequence was this Three years before the Russians hadthe bomb in fact before on just about anyonersquos account the cold warhad begun American analysts were already advocating a massive dis-persion of factories and populations against atomic aerial attack

As the cold war arms race accelerated the search for ldquodefense in spacerdquogrew more desperate jet bombers atomic bombs hydrogen bombsintercontinental ballistic missiles With each step more frantic urgingto spread the cities into their ldquomarketing areasrdquo Highway systems

Galison | War against the Center 29

Centralized decentralized and distributed networksSource Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

Survivable atomic warmdashthe goal of the fteen-year struggle since theSurvey crew picked through the still radioactive rubble at HiroshimaBaran again

If war does not mean the end of the earth in a black and whitemanner then it follows that we should do those things that makethe shade of gray as light as possible to plan now to minimizepotential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permitthe survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstructthe economy swiftly39

That reconstruction demanded the elimination of the hierarchical center alternately referred to over these rst decades of the cold war asthe linchpin the bottleneck and the node

The problem as Baran formulated it did involve new equipment tolabel digitally each packet of information with a ldquotordquo and ldquofromrdquo andthen to route these fragments over diverse paths toward their eventualreassembly on arrival But before anything could be built moved dig-itized or reinforced the conceptual problem required attention Thatreconceptualization now took as it had not before a mathematicalform If nodes were replaced with redundant links how could heexploit the information-theoretic approach of Claude Shannon to countthe surviving paths between points in the array

Here is how Baran reasoned

Let us consider the synthesis of a communication network whichwill allow several hundred major communications stations to talkwith one another after an enemy attack As a criterion of surviv-ability we elect to use the percentage of stations both survivingthe physical attack and remaining in electrical connection withthe largest single group of surviving stations This criterion ischosen as a conservative measure of the ability of the survivingstations to operate together as a coherent entity after the attack40

With the result that a redundancy of at least R = 3would ensure a likely survival rate of nearly 75 percentBaran could now sketch the distributed system thatwould vouchsafe communication after nuclear war

Worst obviously was the centralized node that rep-resented the single critical target This was the situationwith concentrated steel electricity or oil plants it wasthe structure of the hubbed railway system It was inshort the bombing plannerrsquos dream and the bombingvictimrsquos nightmare Decentralized nodes that main-tained a local hierarchical structure were clearly better

Galison | War against the Center 27

a complete grid structure was best of all To a certain extent such gridsstood for the defensive ideal of dispersion more generally By increasingthe number of targets one decreased the likelihood of incapacitationHalting abortive and awkward though it was Baranrsquos scheme (alongwith a similar one developed in England) slowly wended its way throughdifferent incarnations in the ARPANET and Milnet But the elusivegoal all through these decades of distributed communication was a dis-tributed grid or mesh a thrust in the rst instance aimed at removingthe critical node Though in the garb of nuclear survivability the gridmay not appear as the redemptive Internet of our dreams that tech-nology grew directly out of fifteen years of longing for a world stillstanding after thermonuclear war41

4 We Are Become TargetsDuring the years of World War II American and British planners andanalysts learned to see through a bombsight Not in a single glimpsebut in the routine killings and losses that accompanied ever more fre-quently repeated raids Twenty-four hours a day day after day monthafter month year after year the planners and analysts studied andrestudied the interdependencies of the German economy circled tar-gets blasted factories leveled cities analyzed the damage and struckagain Chemicals nitric acid methanol Basic materials rubber steeloil aviation gas Transport systems electrical generators And popula-tion centers area bombing by the combined American and Britishforces killed some 600000 Germans In a war that the Nazis renderedever more vicious even as their defeat seemed inevitable the Americansrsquoearly dreams of precision bombing went by the way Two hundredplanes over Schweinfurt then four hundred but also Hamburg LuumlbeckMuumlnster Berlin Dresden Regensburg year after year Measuring bombloads accuracies reconstruction time 35 ton of bombs per acre toinduce damage of 8 percent delay time for reconstruction two and a

28 Grey Room 04

half months A calculus of fractions probabilities delaysBy the warrsquos end a new category of analyst had come into existence

more often than not social scientists and industrialists but also human-ists diplomats mathematicians and natural scientists Piecing togetherfragments of intelligence examining reconnaissance photographs theypainted an elaborate portrait of a wartime foe By warrsquos end the Surveyanalysts had come to see German and Japanese cities through what onemight call a ldquodestructive functionalismrdquo dependencies leading back-ward they kept hoping to the ever-elusive linchpin that when pulledwould topple the structure Schweinfurt was supposed to be one suchpoint with its all-important bearing factories And after Schweinfurtthere were other ldquobottlenecksrdquo to be targeted other cities other plantsother transshipment points

Perhaps before Hiroshima the bombsight eye had already begun toreect back I donrsquot know But in the atomic rubble as the analysts inter-viewed hundreds of blast survivors and canvassed the broken struc-tures as they methodically noted which kinds of concrete walls stillstood at various radii of destruction they began quite explicitly to seethemselves to see America through the bombardierrsquos eye They beganto wonder what an American city would look like after the bomb hadfallen Returning to the United States and publishing their StrategicBombing Survey things began to look different They began to see them-selves their towns and factories on the crosshairs of radial targetingmaps Far from a technological determinism the all-too material tech-nologies and concepts of self were fully imbricated

One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics launched when NorbertWiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedbackmachine that could be mimicked electronically from there it was a shortstep to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way Then humanphysiology began to appear as a cybernetic system then the humanmind then life then even the world system as a whole42 Somewherein the midst of total war a technocratic vision of a technical EnemyOther rose to become a vision of ourselves It was but a heartbeat beforecybernetics saturated the writings of Gregory Bateson and MargaretMead not to speak of philosophers planners and architects

But the consequence was this Three years before the Russians hadthe bomb in fact before on just about anyonersquos account the cold warhad begun American analysts were already advocating a massive dis-persion of factories and populations against atomic aerial attack

As the cold war arms race accelerated the search for ldquodefense in spacerdquogrew more desperate jet bombers atomic bombs hydrogen bombsintercontinental ballistic missiles With each step more frantic urgingto spread the cities into their ldquomarketing areasrdquo Highway systems

Galison | War against the Center 29

Centralized decentralized and distributed networksSource Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

a complete grid structure was best of all To a certain extent such gridsstood for the defensive ideal of dispersion more generally By increasingthe number of targets one decreased the likelihood of incapacitationHalting abortive and awkward though it was Baranrsquos scheme (alongwith a similar one developed in England) slowly wended its way throughdifferent incarnations in the ARPANET and Milnet But the elusivegoal all through these decades of distributed communication was a dis-tributed grid or mesh a thrust in the rst instance aimed at removingthe critical node Though in the garb of nuclear survivability the gridmay not appear as the redemptive Internet of our dreams that tech-nology grew directly out of fifteen years of longing for a world stillstanding after thermonuclear war41

4 We Are Become TargetsDuring the years of World War II American and British planners andanalysts learned to see through a bombsight Not in a single glimpsebut in the routine killings and losses that accompanied ever more fre-quently repeated raids Twenty-four hours a day day after day monthafter month year after year the planners and analysts studied andrestudied the interdependencies of the German economy circled tar-gets blasted factories leveled cities analyzed the damage and struckagain Chemicals nitric acid methanol Basic materials rubber steeloil aviation gas Transport systems electrical generators And popula-tion centers area bombing by the combined American and Britishforces killed some 600000 Germans In a war that the Nazis renderedever more vicious even as their defeat seemed inevitable the Americansrsquoearly dreams of precision bombing went by the way Two hundredplanes over Schweinfurt then four hundred but also Hamburg LuumlbeckMuumlnster Berlin Dresden Regensburg year after year Measuring bombloads accuracies reconstruction time 35 ton of bombs per acre toinduce damage of 8 percent delay time for reconstruction two and a

28 Grey Room 04

half months A calculus of fractions probabilities delaysBy the warrsquos end a new category of analyst had come into existence

more often than not social scientists and industrialists but also human-ists diplomats mathematicians and natural scientists Piecing togetherfragments of intelligence examining reconnaissance photographs theypainted an elaborate portrait of a wartime foe By warrsquos end the Surveyanalysts had come to see German and Japanese cities through what onemight call a ldquodestructive functionalismrdquo dependencies leading back-ward they kept hoping to the ever-elusive linchpin that when pulledwould topple the structure Schweinfurt was supposed to be one suchpoint with its all-important bearing factories And after Schweinfurtthere were other ldquobottlenecksrdquo to be targeted other cities other plantsother transshipment points

Perhaps before Hiroshima the bombsight eye had already begun toreect back I donrsquot know But in the atomic rubble as the analysts inter-viewed hundreds of blast survivors and canvassed the broken struc-tures as they methodically noted which kinds of concrete walls stillstood at various radii of destruction they began quite explicitly to seethemselves to see America through the bombardierrsquos eye They beganto wonder what an American city would look like after the bomb hadfallen Returning to the United States and publishing their StrategicBombing Survey things began to look different They began to see them-selves their towns and factories on the crosshairs of radial targetingmaps Far from a technological determinism the all-too material tech-nologies and concepts of self were fully imbricated

One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics launched when NorbertWiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedbackmachine that could be mimicked electronically from there it was a shortstep to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way Then humanphysiology began to appear as a cybernetic system then the humanmind then life then even the world system as a whole42 Somewherein the midst of total war a technocratic vision of a technical EnemyOther rose to become a vision of ourselves It was but a heartbeat beforecybernetics saturated the writings of Gregory Bateson and MargaretMead not to speak of philosophers planners and architects

But the consequence was this Three years before the Russians hadthe bomb in fact before on just about anyonersquos account the cold warhad begun American analysts were already advocating a massive dis-persion of factories and populations against atomic aerial attack

As the cold war arms race accelerated the search for ldquodefense in spacerdquogrew more desperate jet bombers atomic bombs hydrogen bombsintercontinental ballistic missiles With each step more frantic urgingto spread the cities into their ldquomarketing areasrdquo Highway systems

Galison | War against the Center 29

Centralized decentralized and distributed networksSource Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

half months A calculus of fractions probabilities delaysBy the warrsquos end a new category of analyst had come into existence

more often than not social scientists and industrialists but also human-ists diplomats mathematicians and natural scientists Piecing togetherfragments of intelligence examining reconnaissance photographs theypainted an elaborate portrait of a wartime foe By warrsquos end the Surveyanalysts had come to see German and Japanese cities through what onemight call a ldquodestructive functionalismrdquo dependencies leading back-ward they kept hoping to the ever-elusive linchpin that when pulledwould topple the structure Schweinfurt was supposed to be one suchpoint with its all-important bearing factories And after Schweinfurtthere were other ldquobottlenecksrdquo to be targeted other cities other plantsother transshipment points

Perhaps before Hiroshima the bombsight eye had already begun toreect back I donrsquot know But in the atomic rubble as the analysts inter-viewed hundreds of blast survivors and canvassed the broken struc-tures as they methodically noted which kinds of concrete walls stillstood at various radii of destruction they began quite explicitly to seethemselves to see America through the bombardierrsquos eye They beganto wonder what an American city would look like after the bomb hadfallen Returning to the United States and publishing their StrategicBombing Survey things began to look different They began to see them-selves their towns and factories on the crosshairs of radial targetingmaps Far from a technological determinism the all-too material tech-nologies and concepts of self were fully imbricated

One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics launched when NorbertWiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedbackmachine that could be mimicked electronically from there it was a shortstep to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way Then humanphysiology began to appear as a cybernetic system then the humanmind then life then even the world system as a whole42 Somewherein the midst of total war a technocratic vision of a technical EnemyOther rose to become a vision of ourselves It was but a heartbeat beforecybernetics saturated the writings of Gregory Bateson and MargaretMead not to speak of philosophers planners and architects

But the consequence was this Three years before the Russians hadthe bomb in fact before on just about anyonersquos account the cold warhad begun American analysts were already advocating a massive dis-persion of factories and populations against atomic aerial attack

As the cold war arms race accelerated the search for ldquodefense in spacerdquogrew more desperate jet bombers atomic bombs hydrogen bombsintercontinental ballistic missiles With each step more frantic urgingto spread the cities into their ldquomarketing areasrdquo Highway systems

Galison | War against the Center 29

Centralized decentralized and distributed networksSource Baran ldquoOn DistributedCommunicationsrdquo

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

dispersed factories gridded telephone links If nuclear war could not bewon it could perhaps be survivedmdashif the nodal points of the societycould be broken up and scattered redundantly through space Meshedsatellite communities joined by an interstate and defense highway sys-tem grids of phone nodes joined by an array of cables and radio links

Throughout the transformation of these architectures of infrastruc-ture computation highways and factories lay the remarkable practiceof training Americans to see themselves as targets I have laid particu-lar stress on the step-by-step procedures of laying out regulation mapsidentifying critical plants consulting the Census Bureaursquos assessmentof population and then circling outlining and tracing the perimeters ofdestruction I have done so because it is a crucial part of these eventsthat each community each industry each factory was pressed into ser-vice this way pressed to see itself this way rather than simply receivinga designated perimeter line drawn by the federal government This wasan enlistment an attempt to draw localities into a frame of mind a formof moral-cartographic vision Factory owners who wanted the tax advan-tages had to attach these targeting maps to their proposals and only bydoing so would they garner the certicate of necessity they needed Anatomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects of electri-cal and phone lines highway construction and emergency prepara-tion A state of vigilance both proximately apocalyptic (at any momentthe ldquoall-outrdquo could come) and yet full of the banalities of everyday busi-ness prot margins for the long term plans for market regions and eco-nomic tributaries

Here stands a new bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanianmirroring Having gone through the bomb-planning and bomb-evalu-ating process so many times for enemy maps of Schweinfurt LeunaBerlin Hamburg Hiroshima Tokyo and Nagasaki now the familiarmaps of Gary Pittsburgh New York City Chicago and Wichita began tolook like them Radii around impact sites joined centers to form ldquoattrac-tiverdquo ldquoremunerativerdquo and ldquoprofitablerdquo ground zeroes How many H-bombs to wipe out 60 percent of the chemical or steel industry Howmany bombs to sever the connectivity of 30 percent of the telephonesystem The micro-technology of targeting and dispersing became every-day reasoning Duck and cover so to speak for the Fortune 500 and forthe one hundred largest American cities Safety in space meant avoidconcentration at all costs

Now as the politicians planners military and industrial captainsnever tired of saying there were other reasons to disperse away fromsqualid city centers It is surely so that other forces were already drivingdispersal postwar housing shortages for returning servicemen andtheir families real estate prices racial tension access to transport But

30 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

the obsession with protection in space labeled and levered the processof dispersion validated deurbanization as a patriotic duty certifieddecentering national life as a bulwark of national survival linked itwith Office of Defense Mobilization published it through industrialjournals tied it to the metropolitan planning processes and paid for itwith billions of dollars of tax rebates and zoning shortcuts

Finally it would be absurd to hunt in the forties and fties for all thatcame to characterize the architectural scenersquos fascination for dispersalin the last quarter of the twentieth century absurd because it is alwayspossible to nd antecedents for this or that cultural fragment And yetwhatever American postmodernism came to mean at the height of thecold war in the eighties and nineties it included the architectures ofdispersion counter-urbanization and nonhierarchical grids That dis-persion had a legitimating logicmdashif one can dignify it by that termmdashinthe pounding repetitive process of planning delivering and analyzingstrategic air strikes along with the destructive functionalism of eco-nomic life that accompanied it It has been a long mirrored war againstthe center

Galison | War against the Center 31

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

NotesFirst presented to the conference ldquoArchi-tectures Metaphors Sciencesrdquo PrincetonUniversity 3ndash4 November 2000

1 See for example Fredric JamesonPostmodernism or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism (Durham NC Duke UniversityPress 1991) 38ndash44 David Harvey TheCondition of Postmodernity (1980 reprintOxford Blackwell 1989) 76 and table 41340ndash41 Charles Jencks The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (1977 reprintNew York Rizzoli 1984) and AndreasPapadakis ed Postmodernism on Trial(London Academy Editions 1990)

2 See for example wwwheisedetpdeutschspecialeco61914html andhttpwwwusydeduaususocialpapersliskahtml

3 Peter G Rowe Making a MiddleLandscape (Cambridge MIT Press 1991)which also contains extensive referencesto the vast field of work (cultural socio-logical historical) on suburbanization

4 David MacIsaac Strategic Bombingin World War II (New York and LondonGarland 1976) 54ndash56

5 Michael S Sherry The Rise of Amer-ican Air Power The Creation of Armaged-don (New Haven Conn Yale 1987) 194ndash95

6 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 30September 1945 reprinted with an intro-duction by David MacIsaac (New YorkGarland 1976) vol I 11

7 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 16

8 Alan J Levine The Strategic Bombingof Germany 1940ndash1945 (Westport ConnPraeger 1992) 124ndash25

9 Sherry The Rise of American AirPower 150

10 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 26

11 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29 andLevine The Strategic Bombing of Germany1940ndash1945 106

12 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 29

13 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 83ndash84with quotation on p 84

14 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 45

15 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 49

16 US Strategic Bombing SurveyOverall Report (European War) 53

17 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki ChairmanrsquosOfce 19 June 1946 44 Available online athttpwwwwhistlestoporgstudy_col-lectionsbomblargestrategic_bombingtextbmd1-2txhtm

18 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

19 US Strategic Bombing SurveyThe Effects of the Atomic Bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki 48

20 Industrial Dispersion NationalSecurity Resources Board Is Your Plant aTarget (Washington DCThe NationalSecurity Resources Board 1951) Based onan Industrial Dispersion Task Force repre-senting the Seattle Chamber of Commerceand the City and County Planning Com-missions under the chairmanship of EthanAllen Peyser

21 National Security Resources BoardIs Your Plant a Target 13

22 Executive Office of the PresidentNational Security Resources Board Con-ference of Industrial Development Execu-tives 7 September 1951 49ndash50

23 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities Domestic Commerce Series no31 (Washington DC US GovernmentPrinting Ofce 1952) 3

24 US Department of CommerceIndustrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 4

25 US Department of Commerce

32 Grey Room 04

Industrial Dispersion Guidebook for Com-munities 13

26 Project East River Reduction ofUrban Vulnerability part V (New YorkAssociated Universities July 1952) esppart II 17ndash45

27 Project East River Reduction ofUrban Vulnerability Reliance on theUSSBS was reported in part V(a) sections13 and 32

28 Neil P Hurley SJ ldquoAtomic Vul-nerability in the Chemical Process Indus-tryrdquo Chemical and Engineering News(September 5 1955) 3654ndash60 quotationon p 3655

29 Hurley ldquoAtomic Vulnerability inthe Chemical Process Industryrdquo 3655

30 Hurley ldquoAtomic Vulnerability inthe Chemical Process Industryrdquo 3658

31 Admiral Ben Moreell ldquoWhat the H-Bomb Can Do to US Industriesrdquo USNews and World Report 7 May 1954 62

32 All quotations from Oscar Suter-meister Reduction of Vulnerability in theMilwaukee Area An Exploratory Study17 May 1954 (np)

33 H Spence-Sales A Guide to UrbanDispersal CD-3 (Montreal McGill Univer-sity and Canada Defence Research Com-mittee on Physical Planning October 1956)

34 See for example Dr-Ing AlfredMuumlller Hannover Staumldtebauliche Luftschut-zuntersuchung (Hannover Gebr Houmlltje1957)

35 Address of Vice President RichardNixon to the Governors Conference Lake

George New York 12 July 1954 Typescriptcourtesy of Richard Weingroff FederalHighway Administration

36 Project East River Reduction ofUrban Vulnerability part V 37ndash39

37 Tom Lewis Divided Highways (NewYork Viking Penguin 1997) 108

38 Richard F Weingroff Federal-AidHighway Act of 1956 Creating the InterstateSystem available online at httpwwwtfhrcgovpubrdssummer96p96su10htm

39 Paul Baran ldquoReliable Digital Com-munications Systems Using UnreliableNetwork Repeater Notesrdquo RAND Corpo-ration memorandum P-1995 27 May 1960quoted in Adam Walter Bellack ldquoBehindthe Wizardsrsquo Curtain The Origins of Wide-Area Packet-Switched Computer Networksrdquohonors thesis Department of the Historyof Science Harvard University March1999 29

40 Paul Baran introduction to ldquoOnDistributed Communications I Intro-duction to Distributed CommunicationsNetworkrdquo RAND Corporation memoran-dum RM3420-PR August 1964 originallyfrom circa 1961 Available online athttpwwwrandorgpublicationsRMRM3420RM3420chapter1html

41 Baran ldquoOn Distributed Commu-nicationsrdquo

42 Peter Galison ldquoThe Ontology of theEnemy Norbert Wiener and the Cyber-netic Visionrdquo Critical Inquiry 21 no 1(1994) 228ndash66

Galison | War against the Center 33