Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States

Abstract

In Restricted Data, Alex Wellerstein identifies a contradiction within U.S. nuclear policy: secrecy is essential to national security but is also incompatible with democracy. The history spans the discovery of nuclear fission to the present; links places as distant as Nazi Germany and Hanford, Washington; brings new insight to forgotten events (such as William L. Laurence's 1946 Pulitzer Prize); and relies on archival material so recently declassified that readers can practically smell the redactor's ink. The book is a reflection of Wellerstein's skill as a writer and years spent thinking deeply about nuclear weapons; despite the vast array of information, every word is worth reading. Wellerstein argues that nuclear weapons shaped the form and function of government secrecy but not without irony. While secrecy is anathema to science, scientists working on the U.S. atomic bomb ceased publication of their research, hoping to hinder Nazi Germany's atomic bomb efforts. Scientists' self-censorship thus enabled a secrecy regime that would rigidly control scientific information throughout the Cold War. Yet at the same time, various scientists and politicians worked to see that national security would not trample the ideal of openness. Nuclear policy within the Atomic Energy Commission (Aec) thus careened between the disclosure and strict classification of atomic information. Ultimately deciding that secrecy would thwart Soviet nuclear weapons development, the Aec declared nuclear knowledge to be “restricted data” that was considered classified at the moment of its inception in a scientist's brain (p. 154). The Aec also sought to control the scientists who produced nuclear knowledge and ousted leftist scientists, but Wellerstein also demonstrates how the obsession with secrecy could spiral into absurdity, as when the Aec censored a Scientific American article not because it actually contained classified information but because the author was a weapons scientist and therefore readers might think the article contained classified information.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.