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Alex Wellerstein History of Science, Harvard University |
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Research
This page contains some of the research I have worked on, both past and present, that has materialized into papers, talks, and so forth. If you click the "abstract" link next to an entry, a brief description will appear.
Dissertation
My dissertation, Knowledge and the bomb: Nuclear secrecy in the United States, 1939-2008, is a history of attempts to control nuclear technology through the control of knowledge. My work 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. For more information, click the link. I will be finishing my dissertation by May 2010.
Publications
"Patenting the bomb: Nuclear weapons, intellectual property, and technological control," Isis 99, no. 1 (March 2008): 57-87. (abstract)
See also:
» My page of images and details of the atomic patents
» NPR story and interview about the atomic patents
» PBS "History Detectives" interview about atomic patents
The Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear weapons during World War II, was not only one of the largest governmental research and development endeavors of all time, it also included one of the largest and most aggressive patenting programs of all time. Thousands of inventions were reviewed for potential patentability by a large staff of project lawyers, and in the end patents were filed in 493 different subject fields covering everything "from the ore as mined to the atomic bomb," and the program was aggressively supported and championed by such top-level players as Vannevar Bush, General Leslie Groves, and even Franklin D. Roosevelt. But why patent the atomic bomb in the first place? Aren't patents supposed to be openly viewable, and aren't nuclear weapons supposed to be kept secret? Answering the basic questions about this long-neglected part of Manhattan Project history requires a careful look at the wartime patenting practices as well as, I argue, a re-thinking of the inherent openness of patents and inherent secrecy of nuclear weapons.
"Inside the Atomic Patent Office," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 64, no. 2 (May/June 2008): 26-31, 60-61. (abstract)
This more-accessible article also looks at the Manhattan Project patenting program, focusing in particular on the work of William A. Shurcliff, the "Manhattan Project patent censor." "Before Stagg Field, before Trinity, before the atomic age dawned above Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nascent nuclear technologies emerged in a world unsure of how to manage the bevy of new and dangerous secrets. The surprising method of early atomic control? Patent censorship."
"From Classified to Commonplace: The Trajectory of the Hydrogen Bomb 'Secret,'" Endeavour 32, no. 2 (June 2008): 47-52. (abstract)
In this article I look at the rise-and-fall of the importance of the "secret" of the hydrogen bomb. Once the paradigmatic example of Cold War "restricted data," it now can be found in children's encylopedias. I briefly explore this history as a way of understanding the changing nature of secrecy over time, and the eventual declining importance of "hydrogen bomb" as a useful analytic category for talking about nuclear weapons.
"Die geheimen Patente – eine andere Sicht auf die Atombombe," in Atombilder: Ikongraphien des Atoms in Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit des 20. Jahrhundertsts, ed. Jochen Hennig and Charlotte Bigg (Berlin: Wallstein Verlag, 2009): 159-167. (abstract)
This article (in German) looks at the Manhattan Project patenting program as a unique lens through which to see the development of the bomb. Title translates to "The secret patents: A different view of the atomic bomb." The volume is called Atomic Images: Iconographies of the Atom in 20th century science and culture. It was graciously translated by someone with far better German skills than my own.
"States of Eugenics: Institutions and the Practices of Compulsory Sterilization in California," in Reframing Rights, ed. Sheila Jasanoff (2009). Forthcoming. (abstract)
This chapter in an edited volume explores the ways in which the practice of compulsory sterilization programs in California in the first half of the twentieth century do not conform to the intellectual-history model of the history of eugenics, and instead point the way to a more practice-based, institution-based understanding of the history of eugenics.
Book reviews
"State Secrets," Endeavour 32, no. 4 (December 2008): 123-124. (Review of Kristie Macrakis, Seduced By Secrets: Inside the Stasi's Spy-Tech World.)
"Our Special Bomb," Endeavour 33, no. 2 (June 2009): 44-45. (Review of Michael Gordin, Five Days in August.)
Talks given
"Secrecy and the Bomb: From the Postwar to the Cold War." States of Secrecy Conference, Harvard University, April 2009; History of Science Society (HSS) Annual Meeting, Phoenix, AZ, November 2009 (forthcoming).
Invited Panelist, "Archival Research in the Sciences: A Discussion with Graduate Students," New England Archivists Biannual Meeting, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, March 2009.
"Selling Secrecy: Laser Fusion, Classification, and the Turbulent 1970s." STS Circle at Harvard Kennedy School, October 2008. (abstract)
In the early 1970s, a small Michigan firm made business headlines with its ambitious attempt to privatize, patent, and promote a new form of clean fusion technology for energy generation. The problem was, in the eyes of the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the technology was neither new nor private: it had been under development in secret at the Livermore and Los Alamos weapons laboratories for nearly a decade. Even worse, the canonical Cold War secret—the design of the hydrogen bomb—was at the core of the work, known as laser fusion. This paper looks at the history of laser fusion as a way of exploring tensions between different modes of secrecy—governmental, corporate, and scientific—as they intersected over the course of a decade that saw the post-Nixonian backlash against classification, an energy crisis, the dissolution of the AEC, the bust of the post-Sputnik physics bubble, and, eventually, against the wishes of the government, the publication of the so-called "H-bomb secret."
"The Committee on Declassification and the Question of Postwar Secrecy." Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) Annual Meeting, Columbus, OH, June 2008. (abstract)
Three months after the atomic bombings of Japan, General Leslie R. Groves commissioned the Caltech physicist Richard Tolman to chair a "Committee on Declassification" to produce definitive guidelines for postwar atomic energy classification and declassification. The Committee, whose members included the atomic luminaries Robert Bacher, Arthur Compton, Ernest Lawrence, Harold Urey, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, produced a number of reports from late 1945 through mid-1946 that became the bedrock for the United States' postwar classification policy and created the first Declassification Guide. My paper will look at the formation and operation of the Tolman Committee on Declassification, with the aim of looking closely at the members' attitudes towards secrecy itself and its ability to constrain both foreign and domestic scientific and technological development in the field of atomic energy, and the ways in which their work enshrined a particular philosophy of science and technology in the realm of policy in the crucial period as the postwar transitioned into the Cold War.
"'Old H-bomb Arguments Never Die!': History, Secrecy, and the Teller-Ulam Priority Dispute." History of Science Society (HSS) Annual Meeting, Crystal City, VA, November 2007. (abstract)
The history of the development of the hydrogen bomb has been mired in issues related to priority since the first prototype was detonated at the Enewetak Atoll in 1952. The question of who developed the hydrogen bomb—and how—became an ongoing historical dispute that continues to the present day, tied up with questions of politics, personalities, and the nature of "genius." What was originally a behind-the-scenes debate over whether Robert Oppenheimer could have slowed up the H-bomb's development, and whether Klaus Fuchs could have given any useful information on the H-bomb to the Russians, later spilled into a feud over whether the physicist Edward Teller or the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam was the "father" of the weapon. Classification specifically has been blamed for the ambiguity surrounding the origins of the hydrogen bomb, and indeed over time, new revelations about the bomb's origin have emerged as classification restrictions relating to the technical aspects of the weapon were eased. But the process of clarifying has also been muddling: despite increasing knowledge of the so-called Teller-Ulam (or Ulam-Teller) configuration, efforts to resolve the priority dispute unambiguously by scientists (including classification-cleared participants) and historians of science have thus far failed. The ambiguity primarily results, I argue, from the fact that the identity of the actual object of the dispute—the technical configuration itself—is under dispute: as in many priority disputes, the nature of the invention, and what counts as innovation, is itself an area of contention. My paper will be both historical and historiographic, discussing the complicated history of the hydrogen bomb priority dispute, as well as serving as a departure point for an analysis of the effects of government secrecy, the question of nuclear authorship, and an analysis that underscores the failure of the polarizing "openness and secrecy" dialectic as a useful analytic category for the archival historian.
"Towards a Practice-based Account of Sterilization and Eugenics in California." Life Sciences Working Group, Harvard University, April 2007. (abstract)
This paper expands my earlier work on the history of compulsory sterilization (see below), drawing out the argument of what it mght mean to develop a practice-based account (rather than an ideology-based account) of eugenics.
"A Certain Uncertainty: The Generation of Random Numbers from Karl Pearson to the Monte Carlo Method." Harvard Physical Sciences Working Group, November 2006. (abstract)
The use of pseudo-random number generators in the physical and computer sciences, and their strange relationship with the epistemology and ontology of "randomness," is well known. Ostensibly generating their "random" digits by means of wholly deterministic algorithms, pseudo-random generators have called into question not only the meaning of "random" and "disorder," but also the complex relationship between simulation and reality. Less well-known though is the path statistical thinking took from "classical" randomness to pseudo-randomness. This paper looks at the early history of random numbers in the twentieth century, starting with turn-of-the-century attempts to utilize "random" data for statistical simulation, and the perceived failures of classical analogs of chance, such as dice, roulette wheels, and mixed urns. It posits that thinking about random number generation went through a number of distinct phases before the computer, "randomness" went from being a property of the generation of the numbers, to being a property that could be simply tested for in numbers. This paper outlines both the major shifts of statistical thought which occurred during this time, and looks at the statistical and literary techniques used to reaffirm a statistical definition of "randomness" out of the an essentially intangible quality present in commonsense definitions of the term, creating objects which sit uncomfortably between ontological and epistemological definitions of their very claims to reality.
"Nuclear Narratives and Political Reason." Workshop, Acting Within Reason: Cultural Perspectives on Modern Rationality, Harvard University, Center for the Environment/Program on STS, May 2006. (abstract)
This talk explored the way in which different narratives about the ontology of nuclear weapons led historical actors in the period of 1945-1950 to make radically different assessments of what a "rational" political decision could be in the wake of Hiroshima.
"Drawing the Bomb: Secrecy and the Visual Depiction of Nuclear Weapons." 16th Annual Berkeley Symposium, Interdisciplinary Approaches to Visual Representation, University of California, Berkeley, March 2005; Society for Social Studies of Science Annual Meeting, Pasadena, CA, November 2005. (abstract)
Ever since their dramatic and very public debut in the closing days of the Second World War, nuclear weapons have been potent symbols of military and political power, and part of this power has been reinforced by the alleged secrecy of their methods of production, their individual mechanisms, and their designs. They have paradoxically sat at the intersection of high political and cultural visibility and the highest levels of official classification and secrecy. But the few "official" depictions of their internal workings, the "physics package" which initiates their fission and fusion reactions, have been tight-lipped, regulating the majority of all image-making to the private sector, outside the regime of classification. Attempts to graphically depict the internal mechanisms of nuclear weapons have been fraught with epistemological anxiety, with no possibility of recourse to "the thing itself," and yet held forth the promise of understanding "secret" and forbidden knowledge. No other technical artifact has had quite this amount of power and uncertainty in the same space. This paper will explore how these images, and the historical forces which have led to their creation and content, can be used as a heuristic for thinking about the relationship between secrecy, knowledge, representation, and power, while also looking at the ways in which transnational comparisons of "secrecy" (in this case, between the United States and the Soviet Union) can be used to understand both the genealogical nature of "secret knowledge" and curious flows of "understanding" during the Cold War.
"The Organization of Compulsory Sterilization and Eugenics in California, 1909-1951." West Coast History of Science Society Annual Meeting, University of California, San Francisco, 2002. (abstract)
Between 1907 and the early 1960s, over 65,000 developmentally disabled and mentally ill patients were sterilized in the United States under state compulsory sterilization laws. California sterilized by far the most of any participating state, performing almost one third of the total sterilization operations in the entire country. Generally this has been understood within the context of the history of eugenics, the attempt to use the science of heredity to justify often coercive policies to increase the number of the designated "fit" in the population and decrease the number of "unfit." Much of the work on this subject focuses primarily on the ideology of sterilization, looking towards prominent eugenicists who have left the most visible historical record. In contrast to this, my work attempts to re-locate the sterilization practices within their institutional framework, looking closer at the ways in which the legal and bureaucratic infrastructure of the state mental hospitals shaped sterilization practices in California (especially by contrast to other states). This approach helps to bring satisfactory answers to the long-standing questions of why California was so significantly more enthusiastic about sterilization than other U.S. states, why California's sterilization rates abruptly dropped to almost nothing in the early 1950s without any obvious reason, and a more comprehensive understanding of the exact relation of the California sterilization program to the sterilization programs of Nazi Germany, to which they are often directly compared in ideology but not in practice.
Guest lectures
"The Hydrogen Bomb: Physics, History, Politics." Invited undergraduate guest lecture, Science A-41, "Einstein Revolution," Harvard University, April 2009. (abstract)
» Video (Quicktime, 87 MB) (Note: audio is mute for first 5 minutes)
» Slides (PDF, 11.5 MB)
This 90-minute lecture for Peter Galison's course for the Harvard "Core" program covers the science and history of the hydrogen bomb and nuclear fusion in general. The audio on the recording is mute for the first 5 minutes (my fault—I had not turned on the wireless microphone).
"Weapon Without Limit? Science and the State in the 20th Century." Invited undergraduate guest lecture, History of Science 97a, Sophomore Tutorial, Harvard University, April 2009. (abstract)
This 60-minute lecture for an introductory history of science course discussed the history of physics and government funding from the Manhattan Project through the Cold War.
"German Physics, Nazi Physics." Invited undergraduate guest lecture, STS 042, "Physics in the 20th Century," MIT, March 2009. (abstract)
This 90-minute lecture for a course on the history of physics at MIT, taught by David Kaiser, covered the rise and fall of the Nazi Deutsche Physik movement, the discovery of nuclear fission and the chain reaction, and the German nuclear energy program.
Last updated June 2009.