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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.
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.
