'Weaponizing' the Wind

The Allies actively 'weaponized' the wind to increase the lethalness of two death-creators during WWII (fire bombs and atomic radiation) and had fall back plans to use it with two others (chemicals and germs).

The Axis did weaponize the wind with the latter two (Japan with germs and Italy with chemical gas).

But it may be said that the elites of these modern nations all did so very, very reluctantly --- even secretly.

For handing over some of their total powers over life and death to Nature (the wind) was as about as comfortable for these male elites of superior races as it would be if they offered to share those powers with women, the poor , the unfit and the lesser races.

For pre WWII modernity was all about illusions of total control and total precision and total predictability and the wayward wind held none of those attributes.

How modernity really wanted to fight WWII was with the Norden Bombsight, able - it was claimed - to unerringly drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from 25,000 feet.

 The Norden and its equivalents in long range land artillery, battleship guns and long lance torpedoes would make victory swift, almost bloodless and cheap.

WWII , of course, was anything but.

So a year or two into the unexpectedly long war, most modernist elites reluctantly - and secretly - changed tack.

Germ and gas (wind-carried) warfare had never been totally ignored but were quite low in priority - now more money was poured into secret efforts to make them workable weapons of war --- if desperate need required it.

National leaders went on parroting in public their bomber commanders' line that precision use of high explosives would take out vital enemy industrial assets without killing many civilians - but more and more mixed in with the (in)precise HE bombs were largely un-publicized fire bombs.

The HE was really only there to calm public and armed forces consciences ---- and to 'open up' buildings so the fire bombs could work better with the far more inflammable material inside.

If the weather had been dry enough and the wind was just right, and enough fire and HE bombs fell in the centre of a very big city in a short enough period, a self-sustaining firestorm could do far more damage than any single WWII atomic bomb was capable of.

The updraft from the intense concentrated burn drew in air/oxygen from all sides at ground level - creating intense winds and mimicking exactly the bellows that allows primitive furnaces of wood charcoal (think civilian wood framed homes) and lots of oxygen to effortlessly melt ores and metals... and human bodies.

Once having gotten over their public (and private) distaste for using imprecise fire bombs to mostly kill civilians rather than to destroy hard-to-hit factories, elites on the Allied side looked again at nuclear radiation which they had earlier rejected.

(Earlier very modest funding had really been directed at the possibility of nuclear boiler engines for ultra long range submarines.)

It had always been easy to powderize low grade nuclear material (even just enriched ore) and drop it into the wind over a huge city as basically a terror radiation weapon.

But now the claims by some that atoms could be used in a bomb that had HE like blast effects and fire and radiation effects was irresistible for some in the Allied elite.

The public would be lied to and told the new bomb worked by old fashioned blast effects and precision - indeed the atomic bombs were dropped with the aid of the Norden bombsight - but in fact they would mostly kill by wind-fed fire and wind-carried fallout radiation.

Man just had to claim WWII victory at Hiroshima - not Nature.

But Nature listens to no master and Axis-intended radiation dropped at Hiroshima was instead wafted back into Allied children's milk all over the world.

The 'Victory Bomb' was actually our very first man-made global weather cum environmental disaster.

Still think our current climate change disaster can be easily solved by just another 'Manhattan Project'  superhero quick-fix ??

If you could only pick one Manhattan Project ...

One Manhattan Project, procuring the weaponization of atomic fission, was the biggest project of the War. The other Manhattan Project,confounding the weaponization of penicillin, was the smallest. But if you had to choose just one , which one would it be ?

If we seek hints from High Culture, it is noteworthy there have been no highly regarded movies,plays or novels about the project to divert the originally planned use of uranium fission , as a sort of superboiler, into becoming a super weapon instead.

But many non-fiction books have been written about the atomic project's supposedly 'dramatic' events.

All evade the awkward truth that without a genuine moral dilemma experienced by any key actors, there can be no real drama.

By contrast, immediately after the war, a very good movie came out about an effort to 'maximum profitize'  penicillin, probably the closest peacetime and civilian equivalent of the Allied wartime effort to weaponize penicillin.

Clearly this 'crime' was regarded by the filmmakers (and more crucially by viewing audiences world wide as well) as almost the post war equivalent of the Holocaust and as the very symbol of the maximum evil possible.

For THE THIRD MAN was universally regarded as a classic on the day of its release and has stood the test of time, recently being voted the best British movie of all time - not bad for a black and white movie old enough to receive its Old Age Pension.

So its claim that any attempt to de-sanctifying 'the sacred penicillin' is the ultimate in evilness still seems to hold up as credible to modern audiences.

Just imagine then how that public would feel if they knew that the original narrow Allied plans for penicillin (and DDT), if unaltered, could have resulted in a greater loss of human life than even the Holocaust ?

Course unaltered, the far longer and far bigger and far more savage WWII should have seen even deaths due to misery,hunger and disease at war's end than even WWI.

As it was, the shorter, smaller WWI still lost millions at war's end to the Spanish Flu in the West and Typhus in the East.

Many millions did die at the end of WWII : but tens of millions of deaths could have been in the cards, if penicillin and DDT hadn't been available in sufficient amounts to serve all the world, not just Allied frontline troops as originally planned.

Thus Henry Dawson's lonely but ultimately successful effort  to keep penicillin de-weaponized did help to reduce the possible high death toll at the war's end.

And we all should be grateful for that....