Book Review on Fire

In his review of my book, Peter Zimmerman has made some egregious errors. He says that I discuss the detonation of a 100-kiloton bomb at ground level at the Pentagon and criticizes me for choosing a ground burst. In fact I discuss the detonation of a 300-kiloton bomb 1500 feet above the Pentagon. He then says I compare the resulting damage with a 10-kiloton bomb. I do not. Despite Zimmerman’s claims to the contrary, I carefully discuss the relative damage done by blast and fire at Hiroshima (15 kilotons) and Nagasaki (21 kilotons), and in chapter four I present a table showing in detail blast damage by distance to various structures for both cities.

I do not argue, as Zimmerman says, that fire damage has not been incorporated into US nuclear targeting calculations because of “some conspiracy to deny the truth.” On the contrary, I argue vigorously against a notion that organizational interests—which, full-blown, could be understood as conspiracy—explain why fire damage has been ignored.

Zimmerman compliments me when I depart from what he has divined as my “conspiracy theory” to ask how a new mode of thinking gradually replaced entrenched patterns of thought. He laments that it’s too bad I did not expand on that question. But the entire book is about entrenched organizational ways of thinking and doing and the possibilities for organizational change. I wrote a careful scholarly book. He has written a polemic.