American Nukes

About the HONEST JOHN

The high school in Wisconsin is an old brick building with lots of windows, the kids inside a little shadowy, a little blurry, and I’m taking pictures, facing the school. A man walks out the front door, he’s wearing a sort of uniform, his eyes on me. I nod to him as he crosses the grass. I decide not to meet him halfway, not to walk toward him, as that would place me on school property. He jogs a few steps, walks, then jogs a few more steps. Walking is too slow, running toward me is too goofy.

He greets me and without a pause asks me what can he do for me and what I am taking pictures of? Without missing a beat I answer him with the most unexpected answer possible. I tell him I’m photographing that nuclear weapon behind him.

There’s an Honest John on a stand in front of the school. He walked right past it on his way to me. The rocket is painted in the school’s colors and on it is written NEENAH ROCKETS, the school mascot and the name of the school’s football team. He turns at the waist, turns his head even more, and looks back, surprised. That’s a nuclear weapon?

I tell him about Honest John, I tell him that it is a common artifact to have on display, common at least as nuclear weapons go, probably because it looks like a comic-book space rocket with its bulging front and large fins. He thought the rocket had something to do with NASA but I assure him it is a US Army nuclear rocket from the 1950s and in use for decades. I tell him it was a mobile rocket, carried around in three-truck units and would be assembled in the field before firing, its range maybe 30 miles. He is interested now, asks questions, tells me the principal, his boss, has a keen interest in military history and will be thrilled to hear this, tells me I can keep making photographs, offers to escort me onto the property so I can get close, and we do. I’m done in fifteen minutes and he seems worried that he has accidentally pressured me to hurry, telling me earnestly that I can take all the time in the world. But I’m done, having already been making photographs for an hour before he spotted me.

Another high school, another state. I’m in Milledgeville, Illinois, now, pulling into the school’s long driveway and it looks like the campus of some small college, all new and the parking lot is enormous. I drive loop-de-loops from one section to the next and I see sections reserved for teachers, for staff, for students, but I can’t find the visitor parking. I leave the car in the teachers’ lot, away from the other cars—there is ample space all around though the school is in session. I scan the area in front of the building. I scan along the edges of the parking lot. I scan along the path of the driveway. There is no Honest John, There should be but there is not, despite this location being in my database.

I suspect the rocket has been removed in the recent construction and so I walk to the main building, toward the twin double glass doors that look like a side entrance to a shopping mall, hoping to find an office where I can learn what I can about the missing rocket. As I pull the door open a security guard greets me before I can enter and escorts me back outside. What can I do for you, he says, the standard greeting of all security guards. I ask him, do you have a nuclear rocket on display around here?, hoping to catch his interest with the unusual question.

He smiles broadly and asks me in return, do you mean the Honest John? Which in turn surprises me. He tells me that the school system does have an Honest John on display and he tells me he knows that the Honest John was produced in the early part of the Cold War, that instead of having a nuclear warhead it could also have a high-explosive warhead, a sarin gas warhead, or even a warhead filled with small grenade balls that would scatter to kill and maim troop formations. At home he has built a scale model of an Honest John that he has painted it with the school colors and the school team’s name. He says he has worked at the school for a year or so but before this he was a security guard at Los Alamos.

We talk about my photo project for a bit and he tells me that he has tried to tell the principal and the staff that the rocket is an Honest John, that it is a nuclear weapon, but they don’t believe him. They think he doesn’t know what he is talking about, that he’s just the security guard, and how could a nuclear rocket be here in Milledgeville?

The guard tells me that the Honest John hasn’t been moved but the school has. This school is the newly-built high school. The Honest John is at the old high school, now the middle school.

I drive to the old high school, a series of buildings all connected into one fortress-like structure, built that way no doubt with the winter-cold months in mind. Since I could only find parking on the side street I find myself required to walk and walk and walk to round the far end of the connected buildings to reach the front.

But there it is, displayed next to the main entrance, an Honest John, its lower fins missing, angling up toward the sky. Its nose is painted orange, with MISSILES in deep purple along one side. Orange and purple are the school colors and the Honest John is the school mascot, the “Missiles” the name of the football team. It must be a space rocket, or a test rocket of some sort, or an Army artillery rocket with regular explosives, you can almost hear them thinking. Surely it cannot be a cluster munition, it cannot be a chemical weapon, and certainly not a nuclear one, somehow morally deficient.

Gallery

Nukemap

NUKEMAP is a web-based mapping program that attempts to give the user a sense of the destructive power of nuclear weapons. It was created by Alex Wellerstein, a historian specializing in nuclear weapons (see his book on nuclear secrecy and his blog on nuclear weapons). The screenshot below shows the NUKEMAP output for this particular weapon. Click on the map to customize settings.

Videos

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