<nettime> World Trade Center premonition 1973

[Steve <cisler@pobox.com>]

Free society will survive terrorism. John McPhee wrote, in The Curve of
Binding Energy (1973):

     To many people who have participated professionally in the advancement
     of the nuclear age, it seems not just possible but more and more
     apparent that nuclear explosions will again take place in cities. ...
     What will happen when the explosions come --- when a part of New York
     or Cairo or Adelaide has been hollowed out by a device in the kiloton
     range? Since even a so-called fizzle yield could kill a number of
     thousands of people, how many nuclear detonations can the world
     tolerate?  Answers --- again from professional people --- vary, but
     many will say that while there is necessarily a limit to the amount of
     nuclear destruction society can tolerate, the limit is certainly not
     zero. Remarks by, for example, contemporary chemists, physicists, and
     engineers go like this (the segments of dialogue are assembled but not
     invented):
     
     "I think we have to live with the expectation that once every four or
     five years a nuclear explosion will take place and kill a lot of
     people."
     
             ...
     
     "What fraction of a society has to be knocked out to make it collapse?
     We have some benchmarks. None collapsed in the Second World War."
     
     "The largest bomb that has ever been exploded anywhere was sixty
     megatons, and that is one-thousandth the force of an earthquake,
     one-thousandth the force of a hurricane. We have lived with
     earthquakes and hurricanes for a long time."
     
     "It is often assumed that a full-blown nuclear war would be the end of
     life on earth. That is far from the truth. To end life on earth would
     take at least a thousand times the total yield of all the nuclear
     explosives existing in the world, and probably a lot more."
     
     "After a bomb goes off, and the fire ends, quiet descends again, and
     life continues."
     
             ...
     
     "At the start of the First World War, the high-explosive shell was
     described as 'the ultimate weapon.' It was said that the war could not
     last more than two weeks. Then they discovered dirt. They found they
     could get away from the high-explosive shell in trenches. When
     hijackers start holding up whole nations and exploding nuclear bombs,
     we must again discover dirt. We can live with these bombs. The power
     of dirt will be reexploited."
     
     "There is an intensity that society can tolerate. This means that x
     number could die with y frequency in nuclear blasts and society would
     absorb it. This is really true. Ten x and ten y might go beyond the
     intensity limit." "I can imagine a rash of these things happening. I
     can imagine --- in the worst situation --- hundreds of explosions a
     year."
     
     "I see no way of anything happening where the rubric of society would
     collapse, where the majority of the human race would just curl up its
     toes and not care what happens after that. The collective human spirit
     is more powerful than all the bombs we have. Even if quite a few
     nuclear explosions go off and they become part of our existence,
     civilization won't collapse. We will adapt. We will go on. But the
     whole thing is so unpleasant. It is worth moving mountains, if we have
     to, to avoid it."

And near the end of The Curve of Binding Energy, McPhee and Theodore
Taylor (former nuclear weapon designer) are on the road together:

     Driving down from Peekskill, another time, we found ourselves on
     Manhattan's West Side Highway just at sunset and the beginning of
     dusk. There ahead of us several miles, and seeming to rise right out
     of the road, were the two towers of the World Trade Center, windows
     blazing with interior light and with red reflected streaks from the
     sunset over New Jersey. We had been heading for midtown but
     impulsively kept going, drawn irresistibly toward two of the tallest
     buildings in the world. We went down the Chambers Street ramp and
     parked, in a devastation of rubble, beside the Hudson River. Across
     the water, in New Jersey, the Colgate sign, a huge neon clock as red
     as the sky, said 6:15. We looked up the west wall of the nearer tower.
     From so close, so narrow an angle, there was nothing at the top to
     arrest the eye, and the building seemed to be some sort of probe
     touching the earth from the darkness of space. "What an artifact that
     is!" Taylor said, and he walked to the base and paced it off. We went
     inside, into a wide, uncolumned lobby. The building was standing on
     its glass-and-steel walls and on its elevator core. Neither of us had
     been there before. We got into an elevator. He pressed, at random, 40.
     We rode upward in a silence broken only by the muffled whoosh of air
     and machinery and by Taylor's describing where the most effective
     place for a nuclear bomb would be.
     
             ...
     
     We went down a stairway a flight or two and out onto an unfinished
     floor. Piles of construction materials were here and there, but
     otherwise the space was empty, from the elevator core to the glass
     facade.  "I can't think in detail about this subject, considering what
     would happen to people, without getting very upset and not wanting to
     consider it at all," Taylor said. ... Walking to a window of the
     eastern wall, he looked across a space of about six hundred feet, past
     the other Trade Center tower, to a neighboring building, at 1 Liberty
     Plaza. "Through free air, a kiloton bomb will send a lethal dose of
     immediate radiation up to half a mile," he went on. "Or, up to a
     thousand feet, you'd be killed by projectiles.
     
     Anyone in an office facing the Trade Center would die. People in that
     building over there would get it in every conceivable way. Gamma rays
     would get them first. Next comes visible light. Next the neutrons.
     Then the air shock. Then missiles. Unvaporized concrete would go out
     of here at the speed of a rifle shot. A steel-and-concrete missile
     flux would go out one mile and would include in all maybe a tenth the
     weight of the building, about five thousand tons." He pressed up
     against the glass and looked far down to the plaza between the towers.
     "If you exploded a bomb down there, you could conceivably wind up with
     the World Trade Center's two buildings leaning against each other and
     still standing," he said. "There's no question at all that if someone
     were to place a half-kiloton bomb on the front steps where we came in,
     the building would fall into the river."
     
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