Knowledge and the Bomb: Nuclear Secrecy in the United States

"When the American people know the reasons for secrecy, they can be depended upon to keep silent."
Ernest O. Lawrence, 1943.

When the idea of a nuclear chain reaction first occurred to the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, he wondered immediately whether this thought, this mere fantasy of the mind, should be kept secret. When an atomic bomb first exploded over Hiroshima, chief among the questions asked was how it had been kept secret, and whether it should continue to be. When the Cold War began to heat up, the threat of atomic secrets and atomic secrecy seemed to many scientists to possibly threaten the existence of a free world at all. When the threat of global terrorism seemed destined to go nuclear, the question of whether enough secrets had been kept, or whether too many secrets hampered true security, became paramount.

Exhibit 8 in the Rosenberg trial: a cross-section of an implosion-design atomic bomb, drawn by David Greenglass.

From the beginning, nuclear secrecy raised tough questions, questions that got at the heart of pre-existing ideas about the goal of the state, the meaning of science, and the nature of technology. What is a nuclear secret? A blueprint? A substance? An equation? A fact? A set of processes? What sort of control can be put on scientific knowledge—and what sort should be? What is the relationship between nuclear knowledge and nuclear technology? And how should a free state, one where the Enlightenment principle of transparent government has been considered a central ideal since the 18th century, function in a world of dangerous technology and dangerous knowledge?

My Ph.D. dissertation, Knowledge and the bomb: Nuclear secrecy in the United States, 1939-2008, is a history of attempts to control nuclear technology through knowledge control. Beginning with the Manhattan Project and ending with the "War on Terror," the project looks at the overall dynamics of secrecy policies as they unfolded over the course of the latter-half of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first. It examines how nuclear secrecy served as a focal point for competing ideas about the nature of science, technology, and governance, a vital site for understanding the ways in which the idea of knowledge as power has been articulated and re-articulated in the years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

From 1939 to 1945, scientific self-censorship became a strict regime of military secrecy under government control. The bomb's public debut in 1945 led to the eventual gelling of a Cold War approach to nuclear weapons secrecy. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the political atmosphere of the period led to a secrecy that was restrictive towards personnel and liberal towards anything that appeared to foster the free-market, including release of copious information about "dual-use" technologies. In the later 1970s, post-Nixonian anxieties about the nature of secrecy in governance and the direct confrontation they posed for the stability of the Cold War secrecy model produced shifts that persisted through the end of the Cold War. After the Cold War the question of nuclear weapons secrecy was reinvigorated in the face of new enemies, new communication technologies, and new fears.

The issues raised by nuclear secrecy lead us, eventually, beyond the bomb itself. This is a story about the troublesome quandary raised by the co-existence of science, technology, and the state in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The bomb, because it represents the extreme, focuses and sharpens these concerns, but more significantly, it raises profound questions about the survival of democracy in an era of big science and big government. They are about the difficulties posed when the connection between knowledge and power reaches epic, planet-destroying potential through the evolution of technology. The "problem of secrecy," as it was called in 1945, is the problem of modernity in its fullest implications.

"We are, I rather assume, going to have a whole series of crises as a result of
increasing scientific knowledge that is adaptable to blowing the hell out of world."
David Lilienthal, 1945.

I am scheduled to complete my dissertation by May 2010. My dissertation committee includes Peter Galison, Sheila Jasanoff, Mario Biagioli, and David Kaiser. Work relating to this project has been aided by grants and fellowships from the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the American Institute of Physics, and the Office of History and Heritage Resources, United States Department of Energy. My final year of writing and research is being assisted by a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Early Career Fellowship Program.

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