The revolutionary discovery of nuclear fission in December 1938 helped launch the Atomic Age, bringing with it a unique need for secrecy regarding the scientific and technical underpinnings of nuclear weapons. This secrecy evolved into a special category of proscribed information, dubbed "Restricted Data," which is still in place today. Historian Alex Wellerstein spent over 10 years researching various aspects of nuclear secrecy, and his first book, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (University of Chicago Press), was released earlier this month.

Wellerstein is a historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, where his research centers on the history of nuclear weapons and nuclear history. (Fun fact: he served as a historical consultant on the short-lived TV series Manhattan.) A self-described "dedicated archive rat," Wellerstein maintains several homemade databases to keep track of all the digitized files he has accumulated over the years from official, private, and personal archives. The bits that don't find their way into academic papers typically end up as items on his blog, Restricted Data, where he also maintains the NUKEMAP, an interactive tool that enables users to model the impact of various types of nuclear weapons on the geographical location of their choice.

• http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/
• https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

The scope of Wellerstein's thought-provoking book spans the scientific origins of the atomic bomb in the late 1930s all the way through the early 21st century. Each chapter chronicles a key shift in how the US approach to nuclear secrecy gradually evolved over the ensuing decades—and how it still shapes our thinking about nuclear weapons and secrecy today. //

Ars Technica: While researching your book, did you learn anything that really surprised you?

Alex Wellerstein: One was the fact that in the US we still have this parallel separate system for nuclear weapons secrets that is different from any other kind of secrecy. "Restricted Data" was a specially created category for nuclear weapons in 1946 because they really just were not sure what to do with this new concept. So we still have a very 1940s-style system. There's a lot of reasons one could imagine for saying, "Maybe we don't need to treat nuclear weapons as a totally parallel system from everything else in the world. Maybe that's not the best way—maybe we're in some ways inflating the value of this information by doing that."

There is an alternative argument, which is that secrets don't control nuclear weapons very well. It seems obvious to most people, and certainly did to me when I started this, that knowledge is power. Nuclear weapons are sort of infinite power, so their knowledge should be infinitely important, right? But the counterargument—and Oppenheimer was one of the first to really put this out there in a strong policy-framed way—is that secrecy is about control of a certain type of information, what philosophers might call "explicit information," stuff you can write down. You can restrict tons of knowledge just by not letting your experts go to another country and show them how to do stuff.

But that is only a small percentage of what it takes to actually make a weapon, specifically a nuclear weapon. As a result, it might not be the thing you want to focus on to control these weapons. You might want to focus on controlling the processes to make the fuel because that turns out to be the necessary thing. I can draw for you a beautiful sketch of how to make a thermonuclear weapon, but it's not going to help if you don't have the fuel—and you don't because we restrict that.

You could get rid of all of the secrecy tomorrow and the world would not measurably become more dangerous, because it’s other things that are actually keeping these weapons from spreading. To me, it's still a pretty radical idea because it not only goes against our intuitions about the bomb, but it also goes against what we tell ourselves about the way in which technology functions. It's not the equation that gives you the technology; it's the overall socio-political, human system that causes it to exist in the first place.

LtWiggledworth Ars Praetorian
AUG 26, 2021 8:56 PM

goodolejackburton wrote:
All the smug history reinterpretations that say Germany couldn't have won the war conveniently leave this out. A handful of uranium and a few more scientists on their side, and the world would have been on the other side of the looking glass, a la "The Man in The High Castle."

It really was the world war, and far more than the first. Not just in the sense of involving the world, but determining the world. We came very close to what could be legitimately called "the darkest timeline."

There's a miniseries that's worth watching about the Nazi nuclear program, and the successful Allied attempt to undermine it: "The Heavy Water War."

Its one thing to get the scientific understanding to start a reactor, but the Germans were years behind in building the huge industrial base necessary for the bomb. The Manhattan Project should really be understood just as much as an effort to bootstrap an entire industrial sector, as a scientific project. K-25 was the largest building in the world , and used 1% of all the electricity in the US, and that was only one part of the overall effort.

For decades, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has been home to an unusual artifact from World War II: a small cube of solid uranium metal, measuring about two inches on each side and weighing just under 2.5 kilograms. Lab lore holds that the cube was confiscated from Nazi Germany's failed nuclear reactor experiments in the 1940s, but that has never been experimentally verified.

PNNL scientists are developing new nuclear forensic techniques that should help them confirm the the pedigree of this cube—and others like it—once and for all. Those methods could also eventually be used to track illicit trafficking of nuclear material. PNNL's Jon Schwantes and graduate student Brittany Robertson presented some of their initial findings this week at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (a hybrid virtual/in-person event).

University of Maryland physicist Timothy Koeth is among the outsider collaborators in this ongoing research. He has spent over seven years tracking down these rare artifacts of Nazi Germany's nuclear research program, after receiving one as a gift. As of 2019, he and a UMD colleague, Miriam Herbert, had tracked down 10 cubes in the US: one at the Smithsonian, another at Harvard University, a handful in private collections—and of course, the PNNL cube.

What makes these cubes so special is their historical significance. As we reported previously:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/physicists-hunt-uranium-cubes-to-shed-light-on-germanys-failed-nuclear-reactor/

Underpinning the Manhattan Project in the US was the fear that German scientists under Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime would beat the Allies to a nuclear bomb. The Germans had a two-year head-start, but according to Koeth, "fierce competition over finite resources, bitter interpersonal rivalries, and ineffectual scientific management" resulted in significant delays in their progress toward achieving a sustained nuclear reaction. German nuclear scientists were separated into three isolated groups based in Berlin (B), Gottow (G), and Leipzig (L).

Renowned physicist Werner Heisenberg headed up the Berlin group, and as the Allied forces advanced in the winter of 1944, Heisenberg moved his team to a cave under a castle in a small town called Haigerloch—now the site of the Atomkeller Museum. That's where the group built the B-VIII reactor. It resembled an "ominous chandelier," per Koeth, because it was composed of 664 uranium cubes strung together with aircraft cable and then submerged in a tank of heavy water shielded by graphite to prevent radiation exposure.

As the German scientists were racing against time, Manhattan Project lead Lieutenant General Leslie Groves kicked off a covert mission dubbed "Alsos," with the express purpose of gathering information and materials related to Germany's scientific research. When the Allied forces closed in at last, Heisenberg took apart the B-VIII experiment and buried the uranium cubes in a field, ferreting away key documentation in a latrine. (Pity Samuel Goudsmit, the poor physicist who had to dig those out.) Heisenberg himself escaped by bicycle, carrying a few cubes in a backpack.

As Heisenberg himself acknowledged, the German scientists' final experiment failed because the amount of uranium in the cubes was insufficient to trigger a sustained nuclear reaction. But Heisenberg was confident [was he certain?] that "a slight increase in its size would have been sufficient to start off the process of energy production." A model described in a 2009 paper bears that out, showing that the group would only have needed 50 percent more uranium cubes to get the design to work. If it had, our world might look very different today.

The Alsos team purportedly brought the cubes confiscated from Berlin to the United States for use in the uranium processing facility at Oak Ridge. However, Koeth learned that, by April 1945, the US didn't need additional feedstock material. And there is no official record of any cubes entering the country, so most of them have never been accounted for. Ditto for the 400 or so uranium cubes that had been in use by the Gottow group, led by Kurt Diebner.

In ‘Sleeper Agent: The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away,’ former Wall Street Journal reporter Ann Hagedorn provides a captivating account George Koval, who was born in Iowa and died a Soviet hero.

Malcolm Nance, the onetime National Security Agency cryptographer and current Brookings Scholar, once observed, “nothing in the world happens by coincidence.”

But when it came to George Koval, the Soviet sleeper spy carefully embedded into the Manhattan Project who, with his all-American background and scientific training, revealed key American nuclear secrets to his Moscow patrons, the U.S. national security establishment seemed all too willing to overlook as mere coincidences the unlikely concatenation of events leading to Koval’s betrayal.

This database will contains the history of every single Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress which was built. This site shows all the manufactures production-blocks of the B-17s. Click on a production-block to get details of the B-17 serial numbers of the production-block.

The B-17 database is complete now and contains all 12.731 planes:

• Fourteen uranium cubes are what remain of Nazi Germany's nuclear arms effort.
• The Nazis had more than 1,000 of these cubes to start, but what happened to most of them remains a mystery.
• Researchers Tim Koeth and Miriam Hiebert have been tracking the history of these cubes. //

On someone's desk, one of the little gray cubes wouldn't raise an eyebrow. To the untrained eye, they look like paperweights.

"Marie Curie's granddaughter has one. She uses it as a doorstop," Miriam Hiebert, a historian and materials scientist, told Insider.

The weight of the 2-inch objects might be surprising, though — each is about 5 pounds. That's because they're made of the heaviest element on Earth: uranium.

The cubes were once part of experimental nuclear reactors the Nazis designed during World War II. As far as researchers know, only 14 cubes remain in the world, out of more than 1,000 used in Nazi Germany's experiments with nuclear weapons. Over 600 were captured and brought back to the US in the 40s. But even after that, what happened to most of the cubes is still unclear. //

Hiebert and Timothy Koeth, a professor of material science and engineering at the University of Maryland, are writing a book about the cubes. After years of research, they told Insider they think they know what happened.

Koeth describes the cubes as "the only living relic" of Nazi Germany's nuclear effort.

"They are the motivation for the entire Manhattan project," he said.

Righteous Gentiles: How Pius XII and the Catholic Church Saved Half a Million Jews from the Nazis

A relentless band of propagandists has convinced much of the world that Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church, in the face of the great moral crisis of the twentieth century, were little more than Nazi lapdogs. The myth of ?Hitler's pope, ? however, is grounded not in the facts of history but in the ideological agenda of Pius's detractors. Given unprecedented access to Church archives?including a confidential Vatican report on Pius XII?Ronald J. Rychlak documents the heroic response of the Holy Father and countless other Catholics to the plight of Jews under Nazi rule. From the end of World War II until well after his death, Pius XII was universally respected for his leadership in t

Was Pope Pius XII a Nazi Sympathizer?

For almost fifty years, a controversy has raged about Pope Pius XII. Was the Pope who had shepherded the Church through World War II a Nazi sympathizer? Was he, as some have dared call him, Hitler's pope? Did he do nothing to help the Jewish people in the grips of the Holocaust?

In a thoroughly researched and meticulously documented analysis of the historical record, Ronald Rychlak has gotten past the anger and emotion and uncovered the truth about Pius XII. Not only does he refute the accusations against the Pope, but for the first time documents how the slanders against him had their roots in a Soviet Communist campaign to discredit him and, by extension, the Church.

USS Almaack (AKA-10)

(Gareth Wiederkehr)

Leo Major

Leo Major’s story is so preposterous that Hollywood still hasn’t made a movie about it. A French-Canadian who saw action in the Normandy landings, Leo began his military career by full of communications equipment, providing the Allies with invaluable intelligence. He then single-handedly took out a group of elite Nazi SS troops, but lost his left eye after a dying enemy managed to ignite a phosphorus grenade. When a doctor tried to send him home, Leo reportedly replied that he to aim. He later broke several bones in his back, but again refused to be evacuated, returning to the battlefield to participate in the liberation of Holland.

During an early-morning reconnaissance mission at the Battle of the Scheldt, he spotted a German contingent in a village, most of them asleep. A typical soldier would have returned to report to a superior, but for a guy like Leo this was an opportunity. He captured the German commander, and after killing a few soldiers, the entire company of 93 men . He then escorted them back to the Allied lines. Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.

But Leo’s greatest feat was still to come. In April 1945, the Canadians were tasked with liberating the Dutch city of Zwolle. Their plan was to bombard the German positions with artillery until they surrendered. Leo was once again sent on a reconnaissance mission, this time with a friend. His superiors really should’ve known better. Realizing that an artillery barrage would also kill innocent civilians, Leo and his buddy Willie decided to liberate the city all by themselves. Unfortunately, around midnight, Willie was shot and killed. Enraged, Leo grabbed his friend’s weapon and gunned down two Germans, with the others fleeing in terror. He then proceeded to capture a different German vehicle and forced the driver to bring him to an enemy officer at a nearby tavern. Leo then informed the surprised officer that the town was surrounded by an overwhelming Canadian force and that an attack was imminent, before strolling out of the tavern and disappearing into the night.

The next step was to convince the Germans that what he had told the officer was true. Leo spent the rest of the night racing around the town, gunning down Nazis and throwing grenades like a one-man army. After seeing their comrades gunned down by a mad Canadian in an eyepatch, most enemy soldiers made the smart choice and surrendered. As the night wore on, Leo kept appearing at the Allied lines with groups of confused German prisoners—before returning to the city. His final feat was to clear out the local SS headquarters. By 4:00 AM, the Germans had abandoned the town. The artillery attack was canceled, the city saved by a single man.

Leo received numerous medals for his deeds in World War II, and earned even more in Korea. Leo Major died in 2008, but his memory lives on in Zwolle, where he is regarded as a hero.

Happy birthday, America! Now celebrate with some warbird trivia...

the Washington Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler really went over the slide in his “fact check” of her statement.

Kessler claims that the Nazis weren’t socialist and gave her four Pinocchios for saying they were. He even called her “ahistorical.”

Now, it seems farcical that anyone would argue that, given it’s in the very name of their party – the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) or NSDAP -but it’s a common argument on the left. Perhaps it’s understandable that they don’t want to get tagged with that as part of leftist history. //

As the U.S. Holocaust Museum explains, describing the 25 points of the Nazi program:

The 25 points combined extreme nationalism, racial antisemitism, and socialist concepts with German outrage over the Versailles peace settlement following their defeat in World War I.

Now, what’s interesting is Kessler cites the first eight points, which tend to emphasize nationalism and racism. But he doesn’t include the remaining points of the program. Why would that be? He had to see all 25 if he saw the first 8 points. //

Here’s Hitler in 1931:

“To put it quite clearly: we have an economic programme. Point number 13 in that programme demands the nationalisation of all public companies, in other words socialisation, or what is known here as socialism… The basic principle of my Party’s economic programme should be made perfectly clear and that is the principle of authority… The good of the community takes priority over that of the individual. But the State should retain control; every owner should feel himself to be an agent of the State; it is his duty not to misuse his possessions to the detriment of the State or the interests of his fellow countrymen. That is the overriding point. The Third Reich will always retain the right to control property owners.”

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

John McCrae’s immortal words of remembrance of all who fell in the Great War carried through a beautiful ceremony honoring the oft-forgotten war and America’s pivotal role. On Friday morning, politicians, historians, activists, military leaders, artists, and descendants virtually gathered to raise the American flag over the newly-erected World War I memorial in Washington DC.

As the last of the major 20th century US war veterans to receive a national memorial, those who served in WWI now have a powerful tribute to their sacrifice, bravery, and heroism. Hopefully, the monument will help return the Great War to public consciousness. //

The flag had quite a journey to reach Pershing Park, making a physical trip symbolic of that experienced by soldiers. It first was raised inside the US Capitol, before being flown to France to fly over a cemetery of American war dead, then spending time above the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City and finally arriving at its permanent home in DC.

Just before it was raised, the final words of the event were shared by Terry Hamby, the chairman of the World War I Centennial Commission. He dedicated the monument to the men and women of WWI, who answered the call to “serve in places they’ve never visited, for a war they didn’t start, to protect the freedom of people they’d never met.”

The war that brought unspeakable suffering also contributed to the creation of some of the most beloved and heroic literature of modern times. //

There were not many bright spots in the years 1939-1945 when it seemed that not only Great Britain but Western civilization itself sat on the edge of a knife. Yet these years proved to be among the most creative and meaningful for two of the 20th century’s greatest Christian authors. Indeed, those uncertain times were the crucible for a friendship that helped to ignite their astonishing literary imagination. //

Throughout the war years, Tolkien read each new chapter of “The Lord of the Rings” out loud to Lewis, who sometimes wept over the poignancy of a passage. “But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more,” Tolkien later explained, “I should never have brought the ‘The Lord of the Rings’ to a conclusion.”

The 1998 movie “Saving Private Ryan” is one of the all-time great war movies. While much of the movie is a fictional account, the premise behind Capt. Miller’s mission is based on a true story. That is the story of the Niland brothers — Edward, Preston, Robert, and Frederick — from Tonawanda, New York.

The two middle brothers inspiring the “Private Ryan” film, Preston and Robert, had enlisted prior to the beginning of the War. After America entered the war the oldest, Edward, and youngest, Frederick, known as Fritz to his friends, joined up in November 1942. //

When the War Department received word of the tragedy orders were dispatched to return Fritz Niland to the United States. That task fell to the regimental Chaplin, Father Francis Sampson. Sampson located Fritz, who had been searching for his brother in the 82nd and began to paperwork to send him home.

Returning to the United States in 1944, Fritz served for the remainder of the war as an MP in New York.

John Henry Smythe, an RAF navigator from Sierra Leone in West Africa, was shot down and captured in Nazi Germany in 1943.

War had broken out four years earlier when he was 25 years old, and Johnny volunteered to join the fight against fascism after a call from Britain to its colonies for recruits. Again and again, he and his comrades risked their lives in the skies above occupied Europe.

After he was liberated from a prisoner-of-war camp, he would go on to become a senior officer aboard the Empire Windrush and then an amateur courtroom talent of such promise he was invited to train as a barrister in England. As the attorney general of Sierra Leone, he would meet President John F Kennedy in the White House.

As fewer of the veterans of The Second World War still remain with us, we must work even harder to remember their sacrifices. //

In celebration of his 100th birthday, former Secretary of State George Shultz wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post about trust. The second of the ten lessons he cited came from his time in the United States Marine Corps during World War II:

During World War II, I served in the Pacific theater in a Marine outfit that included a sergeant named Palat. I have forgotten his first name, but I have never forgotten the respect and admiration — the deep-seated trust — that he inspired. When Palat was killed in action, it brought home to me more than ever how pitiless war can be.

This article was originally published in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. It is reproduced here with their permission.

As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coördinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For many years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on ``The American Scholar,'' this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge.

• The Editor

The battleship Yamato was among the largest and most powerful battleships of all time. Yamato has reached nearly mythical status, a perfect example of Japan’s fascination with doomed, futile heroics. Built in 1937 at the Kure Naval Arsenal near Hiroshima, //

839 feet at the waterline and weighing seventy thousand tons fully loaded, Yamato was the largest ship of the war, eclipsed only by postwar American aircraft carriers. It and its sister, Musashi, were armed with nine eighteen-inch naval guns, mounted in turrets of three; six 155-millimeter secondary naval guns; twenty-four five-inch guns; 162 twenty-five-millimeter antiaircraft guns; and four 13.2-millimeter heavy machine guns.

All of this firepower was meant to sink enemy battleships—more than one at a time if necessary. The extremely large number of antiaircraft guns, added during a refit, were meant to keep the ship afloat in the face of American air power until it could close within striking range of enemy ships. //

Unfortunately for Yamato and its crew, it was obsolete by the time it was launched in 1941. The ability of fast aircraft carriers to engage enemy ships at the range of their embarked dive and torpedo bombers meant a carrier could attack a battleship at ranges of two hundred miles or more, long before it entered the range of a battleship’s guns. //

Yamato had taken ten torpedo and seven bomb hits, and was hurting badly. Despite counterflooding, the ship continued to list, and once it reached thirty five degrees the order was given to abandon ship. The captain and many of the bridge crew tied themselves to their stations and went down with their ship, while the rest attempted to escape.

At 14:23, it happened. Yamato’s forward internal magazines detonated in a spectacular fireball. It was like a tactical nuclear weapon going off. Later, a navigation officer on one of Japan’s surviving destroyers calculated that the “pillar of fire reached a height of 2,000 meters, that the mushroom-shaped cloud rose to a height of 6,000 meters.” The flash from the explosion that was Yamato’s death knell was seen as far away as Kagoshima on the Japanese mainland.

When it was all over, the Surface Special Attack Force had been almost completely destroyed. Yamato, the cruiser Yahagi and three destroyers were sunk. Several other escorts had been seriously damaged. Gone with the great battleship were 2,498 of its 2,700-person crew.

The new movie “Midway” opened in theaters around the country this weekend. It has been roundly endorsed by Navy leadership. Here is the official statement about the movie from the Director of Naval History:

From: Director of Naval History

To: Senior Navy Leadership

Finally, Hollywood decided to make a $100 million dollar movie about real heroes instead of comic book heroes. In this case, the heroes are the pilots, aircrewmen, submariners, sailors, intelligence officers/code-breakers and senior commanders who against great odds and at great sacrifice turned the tide of the Pacific War against the Empire of Japan at the Battle of Midway on 4 June 1942. Although the movie is not perfectly historically accurate, the producers went to great lengths to be as accurate as possible given time and resource constraints, and it comes far closer than any other movie about naval combat (and is way more accurate than the 1975 “Midway” movie or the more recent “Pearl Harbor.”)