Alex Wellerstein

Fascinating history of US nuclear secrecy. Big takeaways: after the initial burst of post-Hiroshima/Nagasaki fights about secrecy, the US declassified substantial amounts in order to promote the business of nuclear power; capitalism opposed national security (if you assume, which was hotly contested, that secrecy promoted national security). It’s also a story about the importance of know-how and material access versus just abstract scientific knowledge, which is apparently not as much help in making a bomb as you might have thought—Wellerstein refers to this as the idea that there was “a secret” or “nuclear secrets” as opposed to a thick web of know-how.… (mais)

The announcement on August 6, 1945 that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima was not just a statement of the success of the Manhattan Project, but of the efforts to keep their development of it secret from the rest of the world. The scope of this success was all the more remarkable given the tens of thousands of people involved with it and the enormous amount of money and materiel required to turn the bomb from theory into reality. Not only did this deter an arms race, it magnified the shock effect of such a weapon and may have helped to end the war sooner as a result.

In the decades that followed, the secrecy associated with atomic weapons became accepted by most people as both necessary and wise. This has the effect, though, of obscuring the novelty of such secrecy at that time. As Alex Wellerstein makes clear, government secrecy was far from the norm in the United States prior to the 1940s, and the Manhattan Project did much to change this. Wellerstein’s book provides a detailed account of the emergence of this regime of secrecy and how it became an embedded part of American nuclear culture.

As Wellerstein explains, nuclear secrecy was a product of fear. This fear predated even the effort to build the bomb, as scientists such as Leo Szilard debated during the 1930s whether to censor themselves rather than to promote the development of such a destructive technology. While this broke down in the absence of any effective enforcement mechanism, it probably aided their willingness to accept a government-imposed secrecy regime, especially given that the goal of such an effort was to keep the secrets of the atom bomb out of the reach of a Nazi regime that many of them had fled.

This acceptance was tested sorely by the procedures that developed around the Manhattan Project. Under the direction of Leslie Groves, secrecy was maintained through a combination of isolation and compartmentalization. By locating the massive engineering works and design efforts in remote locations and restricting knowledge solely to what people needed to know in order to do their jobs, Groves hoped to limit the possibility of leaks that would alert the Germans and Japanese to their efforts. While Wellerstein considers the boast that the Manhattan Project was “the best kept secret of the war” to be more hyperbole than reality, he does regard it as successful in its primary goal of keeping the development of atomic weapons a secret from the Axis powers.

The onset of the Cold War served to justify the continuation of this secrecy regime. While Wellerstein acknowledges that some degree of nuclear secrecy during the postwar was inevitable, he notes that there were alternatives to what developed. The focus throughout was on the control of knowledge: specifically, the details of the bombs’ designs and the techniques for processing the enriched uranium and plutonium needed to construct them. Revelations about Soviet espionage erased any lingering doubts about the need for such secrecy, and they also had the effect of making knowledge about the bomb seem as much of a threat to national security as the bomb itself.

While this regime was strained by peaceful nuclear initiatives (such as President Dwight Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program) and hostility towards the limitations it imposed on research into nuclear fusion, it largely remained in place until the 1970s, when it came under assault from the post-Watergate hostility towards government secrecy. As part of the new wave of anti-secrecy efforts, a small but determined number of students and peace activists sought to expose the major secrets of nuclear weaponry, most notably the design of the hydrogen bomb. In this they faced a government unprepared for the oblique approach they adopted, which treated the censorship of a submitted article as confirmation that the details were correct. This turned the question of nuclear secrecy from one of freedom of research into one of freedom of speech, which the government found much more difficult to restrict. While the constrained efforts to maintain nuclear secrets, it did not completely defeat them as the persistence of such efforts down to the present-day attests.

Wellerstein’s book is a superb study of an important dynamic in American public life that is too often taken for granted. In it he manages the difficult task of finding a new angle on a familiar subject and using it as stepping stone to a much wider examination than seems possible. This allows him to shed light on how something that was seen as truly unusual became the norm, not just in the realm of nuclear weapons development but across a wide range of American public life. It is for this reason why this is a book that should be read not just by those interested in the history of the atomic bomb or of the development of nuclear technology, but anyone who is fascinated by government secrets more generally and how they came to be so closely guarded.… (mais)

As a declassification archivist at the National Archives for more than 20 years, this book intrigued me when I first heard about it, and I began reading it as soon as it arrived at my door. I had followed the author's "Restricted Data" blog for a number of years, and various blog entries had been helpful in my work at NARA. This book could have gone in a variety of directions, so I was curious to see how things would turn out.

The 459-page volume is divided into three parts. Part I is The Birth of Nuclear Secrecy and contains Chapters 1 through 3. This part covers the development of information security under the aegis of the Manhattan Project. These chapters describe the various conflicts between the Project scientists, national leadership, and the military organization to which they belong. Wellerstein even gets into the conflicts between the scientists themselves. It is clear that many within the Project were fully aware of the import of the research and development that was occuring and that much was at stake in the correct handling of the new sciences evolving in the course of the Project.

Part II, The Cold War Secrecy Regime, consists of Chapters 4, 5, and 6, and covers the establishment of a formal information security program during the transistion from the Manhattan Project to the authority of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), a process that spanned the period 1945-1969. The most important aspects of this change are the Atomic Energy Acts of 1946 and 1954, the latter of which still has great impact on information security and records declassification to this very day. Processes, attitudes, and cultures were established and confirmed during this period and last until the present.

Part III, Challenges to Nuclear Secrecy, spans the period 1969 to the present, a period when societal changes sought to change the information security bureaucracy. The war in Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers, and Watergate all combined to diminish faith and trust in government in all matters, especially those dealing with secrecy. So this era saw the rise of individuals and groups unwilling to accept government professions of the need to protect all nuclear information. Although this period saw significant releases of Restricted Data during this period, the information security culture at the AEC and its successor agency, the Department of Energy (DOE) remain resistant to change, even when the Department Secretary mandates the change.

The story is a sobering and not very inspiring one--and one confirmed by my own personal experience. Despite the passage of so many years, DOE contract and government reviewers still maintain the attitude and practices of their Cold War predecessors--worse in fact, because these reviewers repeatedly review the same records reviewed and declassified in earlier AEC/DOE declassification efforts and reclassify them.

As in-depth as this book is, I was disappointed that the author did not cover another feature of the extensively noted Atomic Energy Act of 1954-the rise of yet another kind of information as special as Restricted Data known as Formerly Restricted Data. Generally decribing military use information such as locations, numbers, yields, effects, logistics, and the such, Formerly Restricted Data is the bane of the existence of any declassification reviewer because it is located everywhere in State Department, Department of Defense, and Military Service records. FRD must be jointly declassified by both DOE and DOD, which means it is seldom declassified. Wellerstein's failure to dive into this significant and related information type is why I awarded four stars in my review.… (mais)