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Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?

by Alex Wellerstein, published September 4th, 2024

I happened to look at a slide deck from Sandia National Laboratories from 2007 that someone had posted on Reddit late last night (you know, as one does, instead of sleeping), and one particular slide jumped out at me: 

It’s a little graphic advertising the different kinds of modeling software that are part of something called the SIERRA framework, as part of a pretty standard “overview” presentation on computer modeling at Sandia that was given at a meeting in Luxembourg.1

Did you catch the part that made me stop and audibly say, “uhhhhh“? Look at the lower right:

So, that looks an awful lot like the cutaway of a compact thermonuclear weapon design. I immediately wondered if I couldn’t find a better resolution version of the same graphic, so I went onto OSTI.gov and starting plugging in terms that seemed relevant. Searching for “Sierra” and “Salinas” and restricting to “Conference presentations” turned up a bunch of other instances of it from the 2007-2011 or so timeframe. The one with the highest resolution came from another presentation, from 2008:2

So this is awfully strange. We’ve got something here that looks like a plausible reentry vehicle for a nuclear warhead. The bits in red, yellow, perhaps fuscia at the “tip” are in the position (and about the right size) to be the arming, fuzing, and firing system. The bits below that — the green, the blue, etc. — look like a thermonuclear warhead. The green part looks like it is meant to represent the location of the “primary,” while the the cylinders-within-cylinders are a classic representation of a thermonuclear “secondary.” One could debate about the exact identity of each color, but it looks a lot like it is meant to represent a radiation case, an interstage medium, a tamper, fusion fuel, and a “sparkplug.” You’ve even got an interesting little “dip” into the central cylinder which looks like a channel to get neutrons into the “sparkplug.” 

By comparison, this image from later in the presentation looks a lot more like what one would expect them to release about a reentry vehicle in a public document — just the arming, fuzing, and firing system (the top part, with the detail at right), and then the “warhead” section depicted as a featureless blank:

Even that is a little more revealing than usual, as it gives pretty precise dimensions. So seeing something that looks like it is meant to represent the warhead itself is… pretty surprising!3

This isn’t some one-off slip up kind of thing. This particular graphic is present in at least half-a-dozen conference presentations on OSTI.gov, and even some on a few other government websites (like this presentation given to NASA). It’s literally the logo they use for this particular software package. And it’s not some kind of redaction error, like the ones I wrote about previously, in which things not dissimilar from the above were very clearly intended to be redacted, but were done so poorly that you could in fact see some aspects of them. This is literally the logo for this particular software framework, and it has been used in lots of presentations (including those done overseas), and is posted all over unclassified, public-facing databases hosted by the federal government.

It took me a little more searching, but I eventually tracked down an isolated version of the image from yet another Sandia presentation:

The slide doesn’t give any clarification as to what we’re looking at, here, other than indicating that it part of modeling work for the purposes of structural dynamics, and is clearly part of a nuclear weapons context.4

The SIERRA software framework, I gather, is a simulation/modeling toolkit that allowed scientists to basically simulate a relatively “full spectrum” of weapons safety issues. This is Sandia’s bread and butter: making sure that your weapon won’t go off if, say, you drop it, or set it on fire, or let it get hit by lightning. Things which have happened a number of times over the years.5 The “Salinas” package in particular seems to be about modeling mechanical aspects of materials. Which is to say, this demonstration of its “capabilities” is not about showing you that it is modeling how a nuclear weapon would detonate. It is showing you, “look, we can model a lot of different materials — steel, uranium, lithium, etc. — and could probably tell you whether they would crack or strain or shatter or whatever if you, say, dropped this weapon.” That’s my quick gloss on the various presentations, anyway.

To give a sense of how strange this is, here is the only “officially sanctioned” way to represent a multistage thermonuclear weapon, according to US Department of Energy guidance since the 1990s:

Figure 13.9, “Unclassified Illustration of a Staged Weapon
(Source: TCG-NAS-2, March 1997),” from the Nuclear Matters Handbook 2020 (Revised), published by Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Matters.

Two circles in a box, maybe inside of a reentry vehicle. That’s it. Nothing that gives any actual sense of size, location, materials, physicality. One can compare this with the images of more speculative thermonuclear weapon designs in the public domain for a sense of how limited the official release is compared with what is “believed to be known” about such things:

Somewhat speculative diagram of a W88 nuclear weapon, from Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman, A Convenient Spy: Wen Ho Lee and the Politics of Nuclear Espionage (Simon & Schuster, 2001), via Howard Morland.

Incidentally, I submitted a FOIA request on that particular guidance document (TCG-NAS-2) some time back, and the document that I got back was hilariously redacted to the point that even terms like “gun-type” and “implosion” were redacted, much less any and all images, despite that document apparently containing examples of what actually could be said publicly about these things.6 Which is just to emphasize, it’s not like the DOE is particularly loose about even as vaguely representational an image as is that one — if anything, the err in the other direction. 

Why are they so uptight about thermonuclear weapon design “shapes”? The official reason, of course, is because of proliferation concerns. But there’s another reason: even the appearance of giving away “secrets” can generate unwanted publicity and political scandal. 

In 1999, the Cox Committee’s report on Chinese nuclear espionage made some hay out of publicly-available depictions of H-bombs, and featured an entire spread dedicated to the fact that “visitors to Los Alamos National Laboratory are provided a 72-page publication that provides, among other things, a primer on the design of thermonuclear weapons.” It sensationalized that very two-circles-in-a-box image that I showed above, and weaponized it. How dare Los Alamos give that away! Despite it being unclassified. But that’s what I mean by unwanted political scandal — lots of scandals about the release of “secrets” involve non-secrets. (There’s a lot on this sort of thing in my book, of course.)

Which leads us to an interesting puzzle: why would the censors repeatedly allow Sandia to use what appears to be a thermonuclear weapon cutaway as part of a promotional diagram for a software package? There are a few possibilities that come to my mind.

I gave a talk at Sandia this summer, and they made me wear this badge (and another one with my face on it, which I wasn’t allowed to photograph or keep) everywhere I went. Presumably so nobody would tell me secrets, but also, perhaps, to indicate my willingness to play Checkers.

One is the idea that this is an accident, a leak, an oopsie. I find this unlikely to the point of near impossibility. Not because the classification officers are perfect. But this is so obviously not something you would authorize for release if you thought it was representing something classified. To have approved many presentations with this graphic in it to go out into the world, to be posted on the websites of multiple government agencies… they’re not perfect, but they’re not fools. Again, if anything, they tend to err on the side not releasing enough. So I find it hard to believe that they’d have messed this up, again and again, when it is the most blatant thing in the world. This isn’t some subtle technical thing. Anyone who thinks about weapons information and secrecy is going to know what a cylindrical secondary looks like. I mean, this thing jumps off the page if you are that kind of person. Which I am, of course, but so are redactors. If this were the case, it would be an incredible and repeat failure of the classification system at many points, in the same way, over several years. One can’t say such a thing is impossible but I find that extremely unlikely.

Another easily dismissible possibility is that this is some kind of deliberate release of classified information. Again, there is an entire infrastructure devoted to not letting this happen. With peoples’ jobs, security clearances, and personal freedoms on the line. Plus the fact that the people who tend to work in these jobs take for granted that secrecy translates to security. Even actual spies wouldn’t do it this way — they’re not about releasing secrets to the public, they’re about channeling them to the people they are spying to, quiet-like. 

So we’re left with much more plausible conclusion that they consider this to be unclassifiable and benign. But why would they think that, given what we know about how sensitive they are to anything that comes even remotely close to representing internal weapon components? 

This “multipurpose test object” (taken from the aforementioned TGC-NAS-2 report from 1997) is an example of what I mean by a deliberately “unclassified shape”: something specified by the DOE as being evocative of the kinds of physical shapes and materials that are involved in nuclear weapons designs, but are explicitly indicated as being not actually relevant to weapons design. So this kind of “shape” is something you could use to validate simulation codes on which would probably work with actual weapons materials/designs, but would not actually reveal any weapons materials/designs information other than what has already been declassified.

The “obvious” answer, if my above assertions are true, is that it must not actually represent a thermonuclear secondary. What else could it be? It could be some kind of pre-approved “unclassified shape” which is used for diagnostics and model verification, for example. There are other examples of this kind of thing that the labs have used over time. That is entirely a possibility. What would be bizarre about this being the answer is that a) “unclassified shapes” generally don’t look like actual, plausible weapon designs, and this thing looks “close-enough”; b) it still gives off the appearance of a classified shape, which as noted, is dangerous in and of itself from a political standpoint; and c) if the goal is just to show off modeling capabilities in a very superficial way (this is essentially an advertising logo) they surely could have picked a million less provocative (from a classification standpoint) examples. 

It’s also possible that it isn’t even meant to be a nuclear weapon at all. Sure, it looks like a reentry vehicle. Yeah… it seems awfully nuke-shaped. But there are other things that can look like nukes but at really meant to be something else. Maybe I’m seeing a “secondary” because I’m primed to see one, by the context? It’s… possible. Neither spheres-within-sphere nor cylinders-within-cylinders are inherently related to nuclear weapons components. But when you place them like that, in a reentry vehicle, in that order… it looks very much like a fusing system, a primary, a secondary… It would be quite surprising to me if it was not meant to be representative of those things, but something totally different. And, again, the original context of that model appears to be very firmly rooted in nuclear weapons development.7

Another possibility is that it is some kind of “deliberate disinformation” or “misinformation.” This is the kind of thing that I think people assume the government labs might do, but in my experience, is pretty unusual and pretty unlikely. In general, you have to remember that the national laboratories are pretty, well, boring, when it comes to classified information. They want to be boring in this respect. They are not doing cloak-and-dagger stuff on the regular. They’re scientists and engineers for the most part. These are not James Bond-wannabes. They don’t parachute behind enemy lines to set up palace coups. They are extremely rule-abiding for the most part. There are lots of social and historical reasons for this (again, my book goes into the historical ones — the anxiety about “nuclear secrets” always made the Atomic Energy Commission and its successor organizations very anxious about being accused of being lax about them). 

And beyond the institutional culture aspects, the idea that a bunch of engineers at Sandia are going to be using a software package logo to deliberate leak out misinformation, just waiting for someone to notice it, seems a little unlikely to me on the face of it. I mean, really. What is the “operation” here? Who is meant to be “fooled”? Me? You? The North  Koreans? It doesn’t feel very realistic.8

And one can add to the above the fact that, at least historically, the Atomic Energy Commission and its successor organizations have frowned on disinformation and misinformation for other very practical reasons. If you release a lie, you run the risk of someone noticing it is a lie, which can draw more attention to the reality. And even misinformation/inaccuracy can put “brackets” around the possibilities of truth. The goal of these organizations is to leave a total blank in the areas that they don’t want people to know about, and misinformation/disinformation/inaccuracy is something other than a total blank. 

That’s where I’ve ended up, in thinking about what this “means” and what possibly accounts for it. But it’s still bizarre that anyone would allow something that looks so suggestive, even if it is not accurate, to be released as an official product of a national laboratory. It seems like a bad idea, anyway. And yet — I can’t come up with an explanation for this that isn’t one kind of bad idea or another. But I think this is the “most plausible bad idea” of the set.

One last thing. In more recent presentations on the SIERRA Mechanics framework, they changed the diagram somewhat:9

The resolution isn’t great, but you can see that the potentially problematic part is much more obscured. But it’s still there, so I don’t think that is really an attempt to draw attention from it, so much as it is an artifact of somewhat careless graphic design. In general, it’s not a great logo by any means — too busy, too complicated, too much information, does not reproduce well at small sizes or low resolutions, etc. — but, as discussed, that is not even close to the most potentially problematic aspect of it!

I saw this and couldn’t resist quickly writing something up about it. That’s all I’ve got. If you’ve got thoughts on it, let me know. And if you haven’t already signed up for it, I am much more active on my other blog, Doomsday Machines, as of late!

I’ve updated this post a few times since I first put it up this afternoon, but just stumbled across something even more helpful. Here’s an image from a 2014 article about computational science at Sandia that looks awfully similar to the one above:10

Unlike the others, it comes with a caption: “The multiple components of a nuclear weapon body are highlighted in this intentionally simplified mesh. Each part is comprised of numerous subcomponents, fastened together with screws, nuts, bolts, jar-lid-like fittings and more.” Which is just to say, it is pretty clearly saying that this “thing” is meant to be some kind of representation of a nuclear weapon, albeit “intentionally simplified.” Which doesn’t really solve the mystery — if anything, it just highlights why I still find it so odd that this thing got approved for released at all! Not in the sense that it contains “secrets” — but in the sense that it is just not the kind of image the national labs tend to release. 

Someone reminded me of something I had seen years ago: the British nuclear program at Aldermaston, when it has published on its own computer modeling in the past, used a sort of “bomb mockup” that looks far more deliberately “fake” than this Sandia one. I offer this up as what I would think is a more  “safe”  approach than something that looks, even superficially, like a “real” secondary design:

This is called the MACE (Modal Analysis Correlation Exercise) assembly, and was created by the UK Atomic Weapons Research Establishment in the 1990s to serve as a sort of a Utah Teapot of weapons structural modeling: a benign shape that could be used to test aspects of the code that would nonetheless tell you if the code would work for real weapons assemblies.11

Anyway, I’m just surprised the DOE would release any image that gave really any implied graphical structure of a thermonuclear secondary, even if it is clearly schematic and meant to be only somewhat representative. It’s more than they usually allow!

  1. Harold Morgan, “Sandia National Laboratories and Engineering Sciences Overview,” SAND2007-6636P, Presentation to Goodyear/Sandia CRADA Meeting Colmar-Berg, Luxembourg (22 October 2007). [↩]
  2. Heidi Ammerlahn, Richard Griffith, and Paul Nielan, “Modeling and Simulation at Sandia: An Overview,” SAND2008-3315P (23 April 2008). [↩]
  3. And, just to be very clear about it, that complicated set of machinery in the render is the arming, fuzing, and firing (AFF) system. The basic shapes of such systems have been declassified for a long time. It is the system that causes the warhead firing signal to be sent if the right conditions are met. It is not the warhead itself and is a separate component. [↩]
  4. Thomas M. Baca, “1523 General Capability Overview,” SAND2007-6128P (1 September 2007). [↩]
  5. Sandia made (and has since put online) a very informative, well-produced, three-part documentary about their work on the technical side of “command and control” of nuclear weapons, titled Always/Never: The Quest for Safety, Control, and Survivability. It’s worth a watch if you haven’t seen it. Separately, one of my favorite bits of weapons jargon is the term “mechanical insult,” which means denting your warhead in some way. [↩]
  6. U.S. Department of Energy, “Joint DOE/DoD Topical Classification Guide for Nuclear Assembly Systems,” TCG-NAS-2 (March 1997), received in 2021 in response to FOIA request HQ-2020-00067-F. [↩]
  7. For example, I don’t know exactly what this is meant to be — an example used in a Los Alamos presentation on computer modeling — but it’s not a nuclear weapon. [↩]
  8. And nor does taking it one level “deeper”: the idea that they’d put out real information to make us think it must be fake information, because why else would they put it out? This is an amusing idea but, I assure you, is not how bureaucrats think, and we are talking, for better or worse, about bureaucrats here. [↩]
  9. E.g., Timothy Walsh, Greg Bunting, Andrew Kurzawski, Ellen Le, and Kevin Dowding, “Large-Scale Inverse Capabilities in Sierra Mechanics,” SAND2019-6059C (May 29, 2019). [↩]
  10. Monte Basgall, “Joint venture,” DEIXIS Magazine (September 2014). [↩]
  11. Some more info on the MACE assembly can be found in this PhD thesis from 2004: Philip Ind, “The Non-Intrusive Model Testing of Delicate and Critical Structures” (Imperial College of Science, Technology, and Medicine, University of London, 2004). The screen cap image comes from an in-house AWRE publication (Discovery) from 2000. [↩]

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News and Notes

Announcing DOOMSDAY MACHINES

by Alex Wellerstein, published July 12th, 2024

I have been busy this summer (and spring, and the winter before that… and the fall before that… and the summer before that…), but one of the things I’ve been busy with has finally launched: Doomsday Machines, a new blog dedicated to exploring the post-apocalyptic imagination from several different perspectives. It will include discussions of post-apocalyptic media, documents that shed light on how governments thought and think about the end of the world, and explorations of the task of creating practical “models” for what the end of the world could look like. Among other exciting things.

The Doomsday Machines banner.

If you’re interested in checking out what it is, head over to https://doomsdaymachines.net/. The “Welcome to Doomsday Machines” post that I put up today lays out what it is going to be all about. It is a very different sort of endeavor than what I am doing on this blog, but hopefully will be seen as a complement to it. And if you’re a fan of my writing on here, you probably will enjoy Doomsday Machines, as it involves a lot of the same kind of topics, albeit in somewhat shorter (and more frequent) posts.

Restricted Data will continue (as much as it has been, anyway) to be a place for me to post more serious thoughts about nuclear history in general. I have recently changed its subtitle from The Nuclear Secrecy Blog to A Nuclear History Blog, because its scope arguably has always gone beyond that of just nuclear secrecy. 

I’m well-behind on updating Restricted Data for awhile now — I have several things I would like to write-up and post here, and who knows, I might be able to find some time soon to do it. But I’ve been really tied up with other projects right now, including Doomsday Machines, but also the next book, the video game project, and some other software I received a grant to work on. My sabbatical has been an extremely busy one, to the extent that I’m somewhat looking forward to the regularity that comes with teaching when I start up again this fall. 

Anyway — I just wanted to post something about Doomsday Machines, and the future of this blog, here. More forthcoming!

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Henry Stimson didn’t go to Kyoto on his honeymoon

by Alex Wellerstein, published July 24th, 2023

The city of Kyoto was the only great city of Japan to be spared serious bombing during World War II, despite being among the top targets preferred for the atomic bomb, thanks to the unprecedented and extraordinary efforts by the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, to protect it. I have written at length on this, and why I have come to think that the issue of Kyoto is actually the key to understanding quite a lot about Truman and the bomb, both prior to and after its use. Whenever the issue of Kyoto comes up in popular discussions, however, one other assertion always arises: that Stimson saved Kyoto because he spent his honeymoon there.

Stimson was not invited by Truman to attend the Potsdam Conference — his rivals, like Byrnes, appear to have gotten him excluded — but the “old man” showed up anyway, with this defiant look on his face. Truman would tell him that he was glad, as Stimson was Truman’s primary conduit of information about the Trinity test and the atomic bomb.

This is used for one of the very few deliberately humorous notes in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) film, which came out last week. I am in the process of writing a longer review of that, and will probably post something else on it here, but it has served as an instigator for me to push out a blog post I had been working on in draft form for several months about this question of the “honeymoon.” As the post title indicates, my conclusion, after spending some time looking into this, is that the honeymoon story is more probably than not a myth. Stimson did go to Kyoto at least twice in the 1920s, but neither trip could be reasonably characterized as a honeymoon, and explaining his actions on Kyoto in World War II as a result of a “honeymoon” is trivializing and misleading.

Nolan’s portrayal of Stimson is, well, not very charitable. Within the narrative construction of the film, Stimson exists to emphasize a growing theme of Oppenheimer becoming sidelined as a “mere” technical expert by the military and government officials. In the one meeting that Stimson appears (it is a fictionalized version of the May 31, 1945, meeting of the Interim Committee that Oppenheimer attended as a member of a Scientific Panel of consultants), Oppenheimer strains to get Stimson and others to see the atomic bomb as something worth taking seriously as a weapon and long-term problem. (This was the same meeting in which Oppenheimer reports on the Scientific Panel’s conclusions against a demonstration of the bomb.)

In the film, Stimson expresses some skepticism at the impressiveness of the bomb (Oppenheimer has to convince him otherwise), shoots down any suggestions about warning the Japanese ahead of it, impresses on the men there that the Japanese are intractably committed to war in the face of defeat, and then agrees that the atomic bomb might save American lives. He then, at the end, looks over a list of 12 possible targets, and without fanfare or opposition removes Kyoto from the list, smiling and saying it was an important cultural treasure to the Japanese, and incidentally, where he and his wife had their honeymoon. In both showings of the film, this gets a big laugh. We’ll come back to that laugh.

Stimson’s opening statement to the Interim Committee meeting on May 31, 1945.

The reality of Stimson, and that meeting, is a lot more complicated than that. One could unpack each of the various components of that meeting as depicted in the film (they are all wrong in some way), but I would just emphasize that Stimson was probably the most high-placed government official to see the atomic bomb in the kinds of terms Oppenheimer cared about. Stimson was the highest-ranked government official to closely follow the atomic bomb’s development, and cared deeply about it as a wartime weapon and as a long-term issue. (His interest in the atomic bomb was essentially the only reason he had not retired from his office.) He absolutely did not believe the Japanese were intractable (he was one of those advocating for a weakening of the terms of unconditional surrender, because he understood the Japanese need to protect their Emperor, even before the MAGIC decrypts showed concrete evidence of this as a sticking point), he absolutely did not frame the atomic bomb’s usage as something that would save American lives. To give a sense of Stimson’s mindset, here is how Stimson opened the May 31, 1945, Interim Committee meeting, according to the minutes:

The Secretary [Stimson] expressed the view, a view shared by General Marshall, that this project should not be considered simply in terms of military weapons, but as a new relationship of ·man to the universe. This discovery might be compared to the discoveries of the Copernican theory and of the laws of gravity, but far more important than these in its effect on the lives of men. While the advances in the field to date had been fostered by the needs of war, it was important to realize that the implications of the project went far beyond the needs of the present war. It must be controlled if possible to make it an assurance of future peace rather than a menace to civilization.1

Could one imagine a sentiment more aligned with that of Oppenheimer’s? Anyway, I digress — but my point is to emphasize that the movie does Stimson dirty here, in turning him into a dummy stand-in representing “the powers that be” and how much their interests could diverge from Oppenheimer’s. In reality, Oppenheimer’s positions were pretty well-represented “at the top” for quite some time; making him into an “outsider” here, I think, obscures the reality quite a bit. There will be more on this in my actual review.2

But let’s get back to the question of Kyoto and the alleged “honeymoon.” I don’t mention the “honeymoon” story in my own work, because I’ve never been able to substantiate it, despite trying. I am quite interested in the events that led to Kyoto being “spared” from the atomic bombing (and all other bombing) in World War II. I believe, and will be writing quite a bit more on this in my next book, that this incident has not been taken seriously enough by historians. For one thing, it was the only targeting decision that President Truman actually directly participated in, when he backed Stimson in removing it from the list. For another thing, the fact that Truman was involved at all was because Stimson was (correctly) afraid that the military (in the personage of Groves and his subordinates) would not recognize his authority as a civilian to make “operational” decisions of this sort. So it is an important moment in the question of civilian-military relations regarding nuclear weapons. And I believe there is other significance to the Kyoto incident that I have written on elsewhere, and will write on more in the future. The point I’m trying to make is that perhaps more than others, I have really wanted to get into the ins-and-outs of the Kyoto question, including Stimson’s motivations, for some time now. 

Target map of Kyoto, June 1945, with atomic bomb aiming point indicated, from General Groves’ files — a sign of how far along the plans were for Kyoto to be the first target of the atomic bomb. For more on the non-bombing of Kyoto, see my 2020 article.

I’ve come to the conclusion, after digging and digging, that the “honeymoon” story is false both in its strict sense (in the sense that Stimson did not “honeymoon” there, under any reasonable definition of “honeymoon”) and in its broader sense (attributing his actions on Kyoto during the war simply to that is misleading). I was suspicious of it early on, when I found that no serious sources actually asserted this apparently-verifiable fact, and because it has a “too clever by half” feeling to it. It feels like a “fact” that was a factor tailor-made for catchy headlines and click-bait news stories, the notion that an entire city and the million people who lived there were saved by the fortunate fact of a pleasant trip of a single man. Now, history often does have such coincidences and idiosyncrasies, to be sure. But you’ve got to be on the watch for fake ones, for half-rumors that get elevated to the status of full facts — especially when such “simple” explanations get used at the expense of interrogating more complex ones. 

None of the serious, scholarly accounts of the Kyoto incident mention that he took a honeymoon there. Stimson himself never claimed this in any of his published writings, from what I have been able to find. There are, as well, several biographies and even an autobiography of Stimson. Thanks to the essential service of the Internet Archive, perusing these quickly is a trivial task. Here are the ones I looked at, searching for any discussion of a honeymoon to anywhere, coming up with nothing: 

Now, not all of the above are as equal in rigor or quality as the others. (Of them, Morison, Hodgson, and Malloy are the ones which dive deepest into his early life.) And yet not one of the above authors has any indication towards the “honeymoon” story. Would not a single of the above authors found it an interesting thing to point out, had they come across any positive proof of it? And it is not that the above do not discuss the Kyoto incident — many of them do, although they do not take it as centrally important as I do. It is often discussed in terms of the apparent contradiction of Stimson’s “old values” (not bombing cities) with his advocacy of the atomic bomb use in general. If the Kyoto “honeymoon” story was true, surely that would inform such a discussion. In addition to the above, I also looked at scholarly articles in JSTOR, and it shows up in the work of no scholars of World War II history, either. 

The photo of Henry Stimson used for his 1917 passport application. Scanned by Ancestry.com.

Did Stimson have a honeymoon? Yes. But to where? That is somewhat unclear, but it doesn’t sound like Asia. Henry Lewis Stimson married Mabel Wellington White in New Haven, Connecticut, on July 6, 1893, after a long and difficult five-and-a-half-year courtship. The delayed marriage was in part to Stimson wanting to secure a solid career “position,” which by 1893 he had done: he had been, at the age of 25, made full partner in the law firm of the famous and prestigious Elihu Root, and his star would just continue to rise from them onward. Their wedding was of sufficiently high social class to carry a notice in both the New York Times and the New York Sun. The only indication that they took any kind of honeymoon that I have found comes from the Times‘ announcement, which mentions that: “The wedding tour of Mr. and Mrs. Stimson will last several weeks.”3 

It is hard to get a firm sense of where Stimson may have gone in this period. This is several years before he began keeping a daily diary (he started in 1909, and it was originally not very verbose in any event). Morison says that “from 1893 through 1903 he went either to Canada or, more frequently, to the old stamping ground in the West.” He mentions trips to Europe, including a climbing of the Matterhorn in 1896, and hiking in Montana. He mentions no trips to Asia in this period, and no honeymoon. Again, one would think, especially given his later high involvement with the affairs of several Asian nations, that if there was such a trip, it would have been noticed and noted. Again, none of the above biographies of Stimson imply that he honeymooned in Asia, nor his autobiography.

The end of Stimson’s 1926 “Trip to Orient” diary, in which he mentions his arrival to Kyoto: “Kyoto at 6. [???] room a delicious dinner at Miyako Hotel. October 3rd. Beautiful day devoted to sightseeing.”

In the summer of 1926 — over thirty years after their wedding — Stimson and his wife (ages 59 and 60) engaged on what he called in his diary the “Trip to Orient.” They started out from New York City by train in late June, crossing through various parts of Canada in July, making various stops along the way to Vancouver. By July 10, they were at sea, crossing the Pacific on a ship. Over the course of July and August, he tracked his progress: Yokohama, Kobe, Shanghai (“very hot”), Nanking (“very hot”), and finally, on August 3, Manila. From here, most of his time was spent in the Philippines, either in meetings in Manila, or traveling to different cities for more meetings. 

This was not really a pleasure trip. Stimson treated it largely as a “fact-finding” mission regarding complicated diplomatic relations with regards to Asian nations and the United States, and had been invited by the Governor General of the Philippines, General Leonard Wood, a friend of Stimson’s. He documented this trip extensively, in over 80 pages of hand-written notes, mostly about conversations he had with people in the Philippines (including the rather dubious views about the “self-governing” potential of different races of man offered up by the Governor General — a reminder of the colonial and imperial nature of this endeavor). On the basis of his mission, in that impressively inexpert way of elite politics in the 1920s (apparently being rich and smart and connected with other rich and smart people was enough to make one a regional expert) was sufficient to later get him audiences with the President, would lead to Stimson becoming Governor General of the Philippines in two years, and Secretary of State after that. So it was quite an important trip for him.

In mid-September the Stimsons began the return trip, which was more leisurely and included stops in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Peking, Kobe, and Kyoto. In China and Japan, he visited temples, dined with Americans and locals. He describes many things he saw, in all of these cities, as “beautiful.” He arrived in Kyoto on October 6, and wrote that he had a “delicious dinner at Miyako Hotel.” The next day, October 3, he describes a “beautiful day devoted to sightseeing,” mentions a Buddhist monastery and temple “on high hill” (“Kiyumizu“), mentions going into Gion, and other things that are still fun to do there. Then the diary ends, which is both frustrating and remarkable, given that his time in Kyoto is what we care about, and that he documented pretty much every aspect of the trip in detail except Kyoto. Through other evidence, we know that on October 5, the Stimsons boarded a ship at Yokohama which arrived in San Francisco on October 20, so he could not have spent too much more time in Kyoto.4

The brief mention of Kyoto in Stimson’s 1929 diary, and his stay (for a second time) at the Miyako Hotel.

Three years later, in March 1929, the Stimsons spent the night in Kyoto. This visit came when Stimson was returning to the United States having ended his position as Governor General of the Philippines, in order to be sworn in as Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State. It was basically an overnight stay: according to his diary, they arrived around 6pm, went to their hotel, and were on a train to Tokyo by 8:15am. 

I would not call any of the above a “honeymoon” under even a broad definition of the term. Certainly Stimson did not appear to call it this in anything he ever said or wrote, which is really what matters. It is also not at all clear, from the above, that Kyoto was particularly “special” to Stimson in any particular way. His 1926 diary entry seems to reflect he had a nice time there. But it doesn’t contain anything that “cracks the code.” (“Sure would hate to see this city ever bombed!”) 

I am absolutely fine with suggesting that Stimson had a really nice time in Kyoto, and that he saw it as something wonderful, and that these resonances played a part in his later decision. It is a remarkable city — I visited it myself for several days in 2016, and one can see why it is regarded as an important cultural monument today, with its ancient temples, castles, streets, districts, and so on. (Some of this specialness is a little circular: Kyoto is one of the only major cities in Japan that has significant pre-war architecture and infrastructure because Stimson had it spared.) 

But let us posit that Stimson had a special attachment to it because of his trip(s) there. That is not, I don’t think, a totally satisfactory answer to why he went to such lengths to keep it off of the target list — nor, I would say, were his professed reasons, which related to avoiding the postwar animosity of the Japanese — but let us, for the sake of argument, accept that it played a role. This is still something different than saying that his took a “honeymoon” there. It is a rather significant trip (in 1926, anyway) that involved a lot more than sightseeing, and his acquaintance with Asia was not superficial. It was not some kind of kooky coincidence, and in any event, the reasons behind Stimson’s actions on Kyoto were more significant than just having a nice time with his wife.5 

So where did the “honeymoon” story come from? I haven’t definitively traced the source, but it seems to come purely out of the world of journalism. If you search for “Stimson + Kyoto + honeymoon” in the ProQuest Historical Newspapers Archive (which is not comprehensive, but has many major newspapers in it), the first relevant entry is a bit of British journalism from 2002 (which describes it as his “second honeymoon,” an interesting qualifier). It appears in another British newspaper in 2006, and then “jumps the pond” to the Wall Street Journal in 2008. None of these stories attribute the statement to any source, or any expert, in particular.

A photo I took in the Gion district of Kyoto, 2017. 

Forgive me for implying that these are not what I would consider particularly strong cases of journalistic research. I have not found any invocations of this trope in any databases I have access to (which are considerable). All of which makes me suspect this is a very recent (~20 years old) myth, one propagated by journalists and the Internet into the realm of “fact.” If I had to guess, calling his 1926 trip a “second honeymoon” was a bit of inventive flourish used by a journalist that, because of its potency as an idea, became repeated and repeated until it took status as fact.6

So why does this matter? Let’s get back to the Nolan film and that audience laugh I mentioned. Why laugh? Why is it funny, or interesting, to assert that Stimson scratched Kyoto off the list because he honeymooned there? Because it is discordant: one is talking about something of great historical importance and tremendous weightiness (the atomic bombings of Japan) being influenced by the idiosyncratic coincidence of an old man having fond memories of a city. It is deeply unexpected, because it pushes against the idea of the targeting of the Japanese cities as being part of a strictly rational, strategic process.

And so here’s the rub, for me: the removal of Kyoto was due to the idiosyncratic sensibilities of a single person (however inscrutable), and the targeting process was less strictly rational and strategic as most people think. But it was not quite as arbitrary and capricious as “Kyoto was spared because of a honeymoon” would imply, and the trivializing of the sparing of Kyoto obscures the actually weighty issues regarding authority (who decides the targets of an atomic bomb?) and Truman’s actual role in the bombings (far less than people think). There’s an interesting and important story here, and treating it for a laugh is, well, annoying to me, to say the least. But more to the point, we should stop repeating the honeymoon myth. If I were giving an alternative framing for journalists (and others) to use, it would be this: “For reasons both personal and strategic, Stimson fought to remove Kyoto from the target list, and to keep it off the list after the military repeatedly tried to put it back on.” That gives Stimson a bit more credit, for one thing, and also invites further interest, rather than closing the door with a too-clever-by-half explanation.

  1. “Notes of the Interim Committee Meeting,” (31 May 1945), copy in Correspondence (“Top Secret”) of the Manhattan Engineer District, 1942-1946, microfilm publication M1109 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1980), Roll 4, Target 6, Folder 3, “Interim Committee and Scientific Panel.” This entire folder is so interesting that I have opted to, unusually, upload it. [↩]
  2. Also, they did not give the actor playing Stimson, James Remar, a mustache. I counted three prominently “missing mustaches” — characters whose appearances were quite defined by their mustaches in real life, but whose actors did not have any: Henry Stimson, Richard Tolman, and Kenneth Nichols (in his postwar visage). In each of these cases, the roles were relatively minor, but it’s mysterious to me why they wouldn’t have had them grow one, or use some makeup. In the case of Tolman, I feel it would have made him stand out a bit more from the crowd, as his presence is used in a non-trivial way in the plot of the film, but he has only one speaking line. The actor playing Nichols is quite small and a “babyface,” which makes it a little hard to see him as a hard-nosed Nichols, especially when he is in his postwar role. This is not really meant as a serious critique, but is the kind of thing that puzzled me, given that the film put a lot of emphasis on small details. [↩]
  3. “Weddings Yesterday,” New York Times (7 July 1893), 4. [↩]
  4. For this account, I both looked at Hodgson’s book, which describes some of it, but then also turned to Stimson’s diary: The Henry Lewis Stimson Diaries, microfilm edition retrieved from the Center for Research Libraries, original from Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut. His “Trip to the Orient” is labeled as volume 6a of his diaries. The date of his return trip aboard the S.S. President Taft I got from a manifest on Ancestry.com. [↩]
  5. I don’t want to take the time here to go into my own theory of what Kyoto meant for Stimson, but let us just say I find more compelling an interpretation which sees Kyoto as a symbolic representation of Stimson’s guilt about the burning of Japan in general, which he was not a fan of. Stimson could not spare Japan, for many reasons, but he could spare Kyoto. Stimson attempted, at various times, to rationalize this — he could hardly convince anyone with that kind of emotional and vague argument — but my sense is that the rationalizations came after the decision. Of all of the speculations about Stimson’s motivations for Kyoto, the most interesting ones are contained in Otis Cary, “The Sparing of Kyoto: Mr. Stimson’s ‘Pet City,’” Japan Quarterly (Oct.-Dec. 1975), 337-347, which suggests that it was the affection of a “ward” of the Stimson’s for Kyoto that pushed him in that direction, but even that seems a little too “literal” for making sense of Stimson’s actions. [↩]
  6. And Wikipedia may be partially to blame as well, in a process that XKCD’s Randall Munroe calls Citogenesis. Perhaps this post will be dubbed sufficiently rigorous to change how it discusses the matter? We shall see. One of the tricky aspects of Wikipedia’s internal epistemology is that for an issue like this, where a myth is asserted by not-great sources but not explicitly debunked by good ones, it becomes all-too-easy for something that experts don’t talk about to become talked about as a fact. [↩]

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Meditations

Deconstructing “The Doomsday Machine” – Part 1: The Question of Memory

by Alex Wellerstein, published June 16th, 2023

When I learned several months ago that Daniel Ellsberg had pancreatic cancer, and was opting not to treat it, I was not quite sure what I ought to do. I consider it a great honor that I got to spend several days with Ellsberg, a few years back, and was periodically in touch with him since then. I’d like to think he was something of a friend, though I never knew him deeply or for that long of a time.

After thinking on it for several days, and feeling conflicted, and talking about it with a friend whose life experience exceeds mine by almost five decades, I opted not to reach out to him when I heard the news — I figured he had a lot more on his plate as it was, that he would be wanting to spend his final days with his family, close friends, and his final attempts at advocacy, and I couldn’t think of anything I would tell him that wouldn’t feel either maudlin or better said by others. Whatever one thinks of him, he is a world-historical figure, and I’m honored just to have met him.

Daniel Ellsberg holding forth at a dinner that was part of a 2018 workshop at the Stevens Institute of Technology on “The President and the Bomb” that was sponsored by the Ploughshares Fund. Dan was supposed to speak for 20 minutes or so but instead spoke for about 2 hours… but it all pretty interesting, if a bit taxing!

But I also felt like I ought to do something, just to commemorate him. I had hoped to maybe do that something while he was still alive, but I knew he was on a tight clock, and my own life didn’t really give me a lot of free time last spring.1 So what I resolved to do was to go over his final book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (Bloomsbury, 2017), in some very close detail, and write something about it.

I had gone over his book when it first came out, in part in preparation for talking to him about it (which I did at some length in 2018), but I had always wanted to really, truly dig into it, and to write something about it. Discussions I had with other scholars, and observations about what was and wasn’t said about the book on Twitter, in conferences, etc., made me feel that the book and its arguments had not really been taken all that seriously by serious students of nuclear history, international relations, or nuclear policy. I had long wanted to write an essay about the book, with the hope of both potentially stimulating more serious academic interest in it — because I do believe it deserves to be taken seriously, even if it (like all books, and especially memoirs, of which it mainly is) need not be taken uncritically — and also applying the lens of someone who has had the time and luxury to try and seriously study many of the events and issues that the book engages with and, in some places, makes rather radical arguments about. 

My hope was that perhaps I would be able to write this essay while Dan was still alive, and get his feedback on it, or perhaps have him answer any lingering questions I had. That obviously did not happen: I finished my deep read of his book today, June 16, 2023, a few hours before I saw his obituary in The Washington Post. (Deep sigh.)

One might think that I might feel regret at being too slow (and I knew, of course, that this was a possibility), but for whatever reason, this feels right and appropriate. It would have been nice to ask him questions, and get his responses to my thoughts, but I also would have felt guilty about burdening him with potentially something else to do in his final days, and possibly be faced with the awkwardness of disagreement, perceived critique, and, of course, the painful (to me) difficulty of talking about death and legacy. 

For me, I think this is fine. I don’t think Dan would have minded this turn of events, though I am sure he might have enjoyed it if I had written the essay some time back, too. I think he’d be happy that I was spurred into action, one way or the other. So I am using Dan’s very recent death as the stimulus to write finally write all of this up, about an hour or so after I learned of his death. What I am going to do, over the next week or so, is write a series of posts on Dan Ellsberg and The Doomsday Machine. This is the first of an unknown number — I’m winging it, and this is going to be written with a hot pen. Rest in Peace, Dan. Thank you.

The Question of Memory

The introduction to The Doomsday Machine lays out a description of the overall context of the book: that Ellsberg had really identified nuclear war planning as the truly dangerous “secret” that the US and global public needed to know about, and that it was the issue that radicalized the one-time RAND Corporation analyst into becoming a whistle-blower. The Pentagon Papers were just going to be the “first taste” of his activities, something important and topical and immediate, and would be followed up with more leaks. Due to a combination of circumstances, this didn’t happen. The documents he had cached about nuclear war plans were irrevocably lost in the wake of the Pentagon Papers (his brother hid them a little too well, and they now are likely buried under a housing development), and life took him in other directions. 

I did get a chance to ask Ellsberg in person why he had waited almost 50 years to write this book, if it was really the true message. To be sure, it’s not like Ellsberg didn’t get involved with nuclear weapons activism in the intervening time, and he did talk about some of the things in the book prior to it (some of its novelty was, I suspect, part of the publicity pitch for the book), but still, it is a long time to sit on something. I didn’t really find his answer all that compelling: he said he had found that publishers weren’t that interested in books about nuclear weapons. That’s a little hard to believe, given how many books have been published on the topic since the 1970s, and one would think the nuclear war fears of the 1980s would have been more than adequate to convince some publishers that the guy behind the Pentagon Papers could sell a few books. And yes, he did lose the documents he intended to leak — but so what? He had kept (he told me) extensive notes from the 1970s on these topics (these notes are what he based a lot of the book on), his memory for these things (even in his 80s, when I met him) seems almost eidetic, and even just as a “memoir” it seems like it would have an audience.

I admit that Dan’s book cover was one of the examples I gave to my press for guidance on the aesthetics for the cover of my own book: dark, cool, no mushroom clouds or over-the-top SECRET stamps.

I suspect the real reason is a little more complicated, aside from the fact that clearly he had decided to live his life a bit after the attempts by the Nixon administration to put him in prison for the rest of his life. He clearly believed that his nuclear secrets were far more dangerous to his own freedom than the Pentagon Papers had been — and he was probably right about that. Despite his longstanding advocacy for the importance of whistleblowers, I got the sense when meeting him that he had decided to prioritize his family a bit more once he was truly free (one thing he said in person that stuck with me was that he pointed out that the divorce rate for whistleblowers was extremely high, and he was incredibly happy and grateful than he was still with his wife), and while the kind of activism he did after Pentagon Papers case did lead to him getting arrested a few times as a protester, it was not the sort of thing that would lead to him living out his days in a Supermax. I suspect he felt that publishing a book that mostly described events over 50 years after the fact (most of the book is about the 1950s and 1960s) was a lot safer than publishing it when many of the people in it were still alive and somewhat influential, and that prosecuting an octogenarian for espionage would be less likely. And the context of the Trump administration spurred him to dive back into this topic, just as it spurred the publishers and audiences of people who suddenly rediscovered nuclear threats. 

I would also note that the book as published could not have been published a whole lot earlier than it did, because it is not just a memoir. It is really an odd hybrid of memoir, historical narrative (which occasionally dips into the memoir, but is often quite independent from Ellsberg’s lived experiences), and moral appeal. The historical narrative parts clearly required a lot of research on Ellsberg’s part over the years, and even the memoir sections derive a lot of their utility from the fact that he was able to compare his perception of things with what we now know about them — for example, he readily admits that the Cuban Missile Crisis as he experienced and perceived it was entirely different from what was later revealed (in the 1990s and later) to have happened. So it would have been a much more limited book if he had published it in the 1970s or 1980s, although its proximity to the events of the memoir would have been closer.

How much should we trust Ellsberg’s memory? This is a question I’ve seen pitched by scholars informally. A historian will instinctively reply: not much. Memory is fickle, and constantly revised for both self and others. It doesn’t mean you can’t listen to memory, but you want to corroborate as much as possible. The fact that nearly everyone else mentioned in Ellsberg’s book is dead makes it very hard to get any easy corroboration, and the fact that many of the events and documents are still highly classified doesn’t help, either.

That being said, I did find it very useful to learn that he had made extensive notes on these matters in the 1970s, so the bulk of a lot of this narrative is not actually +50 years old distant from the events in question, but more like 10-20 years distant. That is still some time, of course. He also did have some documents from this topic squirreled away — when I visited his home in 2018 with Avner Cohen, we were both impressed by the cavernous library, document hoard (including the aforementioned notes), and workspace he had underneath his home. He did release some of those documents on his website promoting the book, some of which are technically “leaks” in that he released un-redacted versions from his personal files (but they are not nearly as “spicy” as the ones he wanted to release). 

Ellberg’s under-the-house library and document collection in his home, circa 2018.

As noted already, I did get to spend some time talking with Ellsberg in person, both socially (several lunches and dinners), in a workshop setting, and at his home for a very long interview I conducted with Avner Cohen in 2018. I was, to say the least, very impressed by him. To contextualize that, let me say that I am not inherently impressed by people seeming to “know their subject well”: as someone who writes and teaches and gives a lot of talks, I know how easy it is, after awhile, to seem like you always have “all the facts at hand.” People are frequently impressed with how good they think my memory must be, but I know that a) I forget things (or details, or get things wrong) all the time when I don’t re-check them, b) I don’t think I have a much better memory than anyone else (and for some things, like numbers, my memory is probably worse than average, because my brain just can’t seem to “hold” numbers very well), and c) anything you spend a lot of time explaining to other people, and in effect engaging with on a sustained and detailed basis, will get really tightly “encoded” in your brain without you really trying. As I like to put it, almost everyone has a great memory regarding the things they do every day, and in my line of work, that means historical details. 

So with that as a preamble, I will say: I was impressed in particular by Dan’s ability for recall. He appeared to have a level of recall much better than average. I don’t think he was faking it, or hallucinating details, or just knew things because he engaged with them on a daily basis. He seemed to be able to accurately recall exact dates, exact subject lines on memos, exact wording. He seemed to do so effortlessly and earnestly — he didn’t seem like it was trying to impress me or others, this was just how he got his point across. I have talked with people who have known him longer than I have who reported that this was always the impression of Dan, this superhuman quickness of memory and thoroughness, and that his ability in his 80s was not nearly as good as it used to be, but was still superhuman.2

So I actually rate Ellsberg’s ability to recall his memories of experiences, documents, etc., pretty high. That does not mean his memories are accurate —  an important distinction. But I believe that the book earnestly and probably with high-fidelity reports things as Ellsberg experienced them. Its recollections need to be subjected to scrutiny and, I would like to hope, become the basis of efforts at corroboration, especially for the most controversial and perhaps most important sections. But they should not be dismissed outright, however fantastical or (at times) self-centered they might appear. I think, frankly, this is what Dan would want: there is nothing about him, or his book, that makes me think that he wants us to accept his narrative on his authority alone. Indeed, as I’ll get to, his entire stated goal of the book — which I believe him on — is that it ought to generate extensive efforts to look into the truth of these matters. 

Next time: Looking at Ellsberg’s claims about the delegated authority under Eisenhower and Kennedy

  1. If I’ve seemed “off the radar,” it isn’t just a perception. The last year was intensely busy in term of teaching and service. Busier, and more generally taxing, than usual, for a lot of reasons. I am now, however, on both my summer “break” as well as beginning a year-long sabbatical, and I find that my reaction to that has been to throw myself into research in an almost frenzied way, working essentially non-stop, seven days a week, and being utterly happy with that change of pace. Many of these efforts will only bear fruit in a year or so, but some of them will be wrapping up projects this summer that have been in a holding pattern for a while. [↩]
  2. “Superhuman” is, of course, hyperbolic — Dan was quite human. But I have, over the years, met several Nobel Prize winners, top-tier academics, a few policymakers who were renown for their abilities, etc., and found that most people of this sort do not give me the impression of being “superhuman” in their cognitive abilities. I don’t mean this as any kind of self-flattery (or self-deprecation), just that when I spend time with these people I come away with the impression that they are smart but specialized, or smart but very-well trained, or smart but have a mental “trick” that is very productive (e.g., a question they ask or method they use that isn’t at all obvious, but usually yields interesting results, and once you realize what they are doing, you could imagine replicating this approach yourself and getting similar sorts of answers — a lot of “academic intellects” fit into this category, I find), and not with the idea that their brain works fundamentally different form other “smart” people I’ve met. I’ve only met two or three people who gave me the impression that their brain just worked fundamentally faster and more generally impressive than the generally “smart,” and gave me some insight into the awe that all of the other scientists of his day had for someone like John von Neumann, who made them all feel like second-raters. Dan is one of this small group of people I’ve met face to face who impressed me as having a brain on a much more “accelerated” template than normal “smartness.” It could be exhausting, too — once he got going, he didn’t want to stop telling you what he thought was important! But more than a few of us are guilty of that… [↩]

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Meditations

Oppenheimer: Vacated but not Vindicated

by Alex Wellerstein, published December 21st, 2022

One of the sleeper news items of last week was that the Department of Energy officially vacated the Atomic Energy Commission decision that stripped J. Robert Oppenheimer of his security clearance in 1954. It did come as a surprise to me. I knew that there was a campaign to overturn Oppenheimer’s clearance loss — I had been asked to give representatives from the American Institute of Physics a background talk about it, in order to help them determine whether to take a stance on it — and also knew that there had been previous, unsuccessful efforts in this respect.

“Beyond loyalty, the harsh requirements of security.” TIME magazine’s June 1954 cover after Oppenheimer’s clearance was stripped.

I didn’t really expect the DOE to do anything about it, though, because there would be no real practical consequence or obvious “gain” for them to do so, and I could imagine several plausible reasons why they wouldn’t want to do it, regardless of their opinion about Oppenheimer and the case. To the first point, the pro-Oppenheimer lobby is pretty small these days; this is not a pressing issue for the American public, or even American scientists. The case is nearly 70 years old, and Oppenheimer himself has been dead for over 50 years; anyone who was aware of it while it happened is quite old (this includes my good friend and colleague Ed Friedman, who tried to organize a protest in favor of Oppenheimer while an undergraduate at MIT in 1954, and was told by his professors that he ought to keep his head down if he didn’t want to run into political trouble), and while Oppenheimer is a subject of many biographies (some quite excellent) and some films, popular interest in him doesn’t seem to generally translate into the argument for his (symbolic) restitution. The people who seemed most invested in this appear to me to be Oppenheimer biographers, who are more tied to Oppenheimer’s legacy emotionally and perhaps financially than your average voter. So why do this? “Righting wrongs” is a nice thing to say, though when it has no practical consequence, it tends not to be a governmental priority. Perhaps it is just meant to be some good PR for the DOE, an agency whose mission is surprisingly unknown to the public (and as such makes it the target of small-government conservatives). Perhaps it is meant to coincide in some way with the upcoming Oppenheimer movie by Christopher Nolan. Perhaps it is some internal bureaucratic move — someone angling for something down the line. Perhaps it just came across the right desk at the right time with the right person. I have no inside story here. (If someone does have an inside story, and wants to share, get in touch.)

Why might they not have done this? For one thing, government agencies tend not to second-guess their previous decisions, even if it was a different agency (the DOE is not the AEC, but it is its successor agency; it has been over a decade since I was inside the DOE’s Germantown headquarters, but when I was there, they still had a massive rendering of the AEC seal over the entrance desk). For another, second-guessing security clearance decisions seems even more fraught with problems. Do they really want to create a precedent for reviewing past security decisions? And how would they split the difference on exonerating Oppenheimer, while not necessarily tying their hands in the future when it came to disqualifying people for clearances? And while the Oppenheimer affair is not a hot political topic anymore, attacks that the DOE is “lax” on the subject of nuclear secrecy and security are a perennial political feature of Washington, and garner big (if ignorant) headlines. So why stick your neck out?

This is why I didn’t really think the DOE would bother — on the balance, it seemed more risky than not, and my experience is that in such situations, the bureaucrats go with the “safe” choice, which is to kick it down the road to a successor. But they did it anyway! So I was, again, surprised. The way they tried to avoid the potential problems I brought up is interesting, though it somewhat constrains the impact of the order. Essentially, the conclusion by the DOE is that the AEC’s decision against Oppenheimer could be vacated because the AEC did not, at several points, follow its own guidelines and procedures. In this, they are 100% correct that the AEC did not follow its own rules; if anything, the DOE statement understates the level of perfidy involved by people like Lewis Strauss, who broke not only AEC rules but probably the law in his attempt to punish Oppenheimer. The entire hearing was deliberately and decisively unfair, and prejudged from the start by many involved. 

This is a very “safe” way to overturn the judgment: basically overturning it on a technicality. What they have not really done is vindicate Oppenheimer. The statement is very positive towards Oppenheimer, and points out the lack of evidence that he ever did anything disloyal to the United States. But the AEC decision against Oppenheimer was based on the idea that he had “fundamental defects” to his character — notably his lying to security officers — and because his “associations” with Communist and Communist-adjacent people (i.e., most of his friends, students, and family) “extended far beyond the tolerable limits of prudence and self-restraint.” The DOE doesn’t really go against these things, except to point out that his issue with “associations” was already well-known and looked-over in the past. What they aren’t saying is, “the entire case against Oppenheimer was flawed, the charges against him were bunk, he was done totally wrong.” What they are saying is, “the AEC didn’t follow its own rules.” 

J. Robert Oppenheimer, from the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.

Which sort of implies, to me, that the DOE is tacitly saying that if the AEC had followed its own procedures (which probably still would have led them, in my view, to revoke his clearance), then the Oppenheimer affair would be fine. I’m not saying they are really saying this, of course. As indicated above, I get it: focusing on procedure gives them an easy “out” of this past decision. If they actually said that the concerns about his “character” were totally inappropriate, they’d be implying that it is OK to lie to security officers. If they said his “associations” were fine, they’d be implying that having half of your entire social network be made up of people who were members of prohibited organizations is fine. These are not precedents they want to, or can, set. 

This gets at a very tricky aspect of the Oppenheimer affair. The motivation for the whole thing was entirely a sham. There were no real concerns that Oppenheimer was a danger to the country or a spy. It was pure political character assassination. This is easy to document. And the proceedings were completely stacked against Oppenheimer — and would have been even if the AEC had followed its own rules, because there isn’t the same presumption of innocence in a security clearance hearing as there is a court of law, and because of the very nature of the thing, Oppenheimer didn’t have access to all of the evidence (because his clearance was suspended, he didn’t have access to classified evidence against him). So the whole thing was both unnecessary and unfair, in my view. 

But. Once you ask the question, Did J. Robert Oppenheimer comport himself according to the standards for a nuclear security clearance in 1954?, it is, in my opinion, very hard to answer “yes.” This is not a referendum on his contributions as a scientist or advisor, or even a referendum on his personality. It is, perhaps, a referendum on the security standards of the time — one can argue they were overly strict and driven more by a hysterical fear of losing “the secret” than practical security. But Oppenheimer’s actions in the 1930s and 1940s definitely did not set him up for a favorable evaluation in the 1950s.

He did have a lot of Communist and near-Communist “associations.” This is just the truth of the matter. His brother, his wife, his sister-in-law, his ex-girlfriend, his students, his colleagues… there’s a lot of Red and Pink in that list! There are really good historical and contextual explanations for that, and the timing matters (Great Depression, etc.). It doesn’t actually mean Oppenheimer was a Communist — though he did probably have closer connections to the Communist Party of the United States than he ever admitted, even if he doesn’t appear to have ever been a card-carrying member — and definitely doesn’t mean he was a spy. But it’s hard to imagine someone in the middle of McCarthyism looking at all that and saying, “this is fine.” This is more of an indictment of McCarthyism than Oppenheimer, to be sure. But even today it would be hard to imagine a director of Los Alamos having that many “associations” with people in radical groups of any political stripe. If it came out tomorrow that the director of a weapons laboratory had family and friends connected to the Proud Boys, for example, there would be some legitimate cause for concern!

And he did exhibit really questionable judgment from the perspective of security. And not just by the standards of the 1950s! He admitted lying to security officers repeatedly about the Chevalier affair. When asked why he did this, Oppenheimer offered up nothing more than, “because I was an idiot.” That is not a strong defense! (The real answer likely was: “Because I was trying to protect my brother.” Which is still a bad answer, but at least a relatable and plausible one.) He admitted to having had an affair with Jean Tatlock, his ill-fated, Communist-adjacent ex-girlfriend, while running Los Alamos. When asked whether this was “consistent with good security,” Oppenheimer tried to argue that it was, because he didn’t really believe Tatlock was a Communist. This is not a good answer! This is not “consistent with good security”! (Again, one might probe a better answer: Tatlock was troubled, and Oppenheimer was trying to help an old friend, and that’s still not great judgment — one can’t imagine Oppenheimer’s wife found it adequate — but it doesn’t look as bad as his actual testimony makes it look.) Again, it is hard to imagine thinking “this is fine.”

Two frames from a 1961 photo session with Oppenheimer by Ulli Steltzer. “He was shy of the camera and I never got more than 12 shots. It is hard to say which expression is most typical.” More on this image, here.

The best one can do with both of these issues (which is what Henry DeWolf Smyth did in his dissenting opinion on the security clearance case) is say that Oppenheimer was flawed-but-human, and that ultimately he doesn’t represent a security risk. Which was clearly a thinkable opinion at the time (Smyth, for one, thought it), but one can readily see why it was the minority view. Ultimately all of this comes down to how serious you think the standards of security ought to be. If you believe that nuclear secrecy and security is paramount, then you want a high bar. If you believe the “system itself is nothing to worship,” as Smyth puts it, and regard it as a “means to an end,” then you might have been willing to let it slide, especially since Oppenheimer’s clearance was about to expire anyway. But even then, one can see the precedent-setting aspects as problematic. Does one really want to say that it is acceptable to lie to security personnel, for example, or that to object to Oppenheimer on those grounds is just anti-Communist hysteria?

This is what I mean by saying this is “tricky.” I don’t worship the security system, obviously. I don’t think the Oppenheimer affair was anything less than a sham. But I also am not sure that Oppenheimer “deserved” a clearance, just because he put in good service for the country.1 I think once you start to evaluate Oppenheimer’s worst behavior by the standards of the 1950s — and frankly, even by the standards of today — it is pretty hard to find it acceptable. I’m well aware that this is not the perspective of most Oppenheimer biographers and certainly not his popular fans; I make this as a historian who isn’t completely willing to dismiss the fears of the 1950s as “hysteria” and who is not generally a fan of seeing historical figures as either perfect heroes of treacherous villains.

So the Department of Energy vacated the Oppenheimer decision, but didn’t quite vindicate it. This is what I meant when I told William Broad that I didn’t think this went quite as far as the real pro-Oppenheimer people might want — it doesn’t say, for example, that Oppenheimer deserved a clearance on his merits, or because the charges against him were all bunk. It gives it to him on the basis of procedure. Which is important, and totally defensible. But a bit shy of total vindication — for reasons, again, that I can totally understand. Would Oppenheimer have been satisfied with this? I doubt it. He would have wanted more of a positive statement about his loyalty than this offers up.

I’m ultimately fine with the DOE’s action. It doesn’t have any practical impact that I can see. But it does go a bit of a way to right a historical wronging, and the Oppenheimer affair was ultimately a wronging. Oppenheimer didn’t deserve it, even if he was imperfect. And even if righting historical wrongs doesn’t do much directly, it does imply that we are capable, as a people and a society and a government, of reevaluating ourselves and our past and coming to terms with errors and injustices. The vacating of the AEC decision in the Oppenheimer affair is, ultimately, less important for what it does for the DOE or Oppenheimer than what it does, and perhaps says, about us. 

  1. So did Klaus Fuchs, as an aside. As Norris Bradbury liked to put it, Fuchs worked very hard for the USA. The problem was, he also worked hard for the Soviet Union. Obviously the cases of Fuchs and Oppenheimer are separated by the key fact that Fuchs was a spy, and Oppenheimer was not! But I just bring this up as an example of the limits of the “good service” argument. There have been plenty of people who put in good service to the country at one point in their lives, and then did things that worked against it. [↩]

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