It’s been forever since I’ve updated on here, and I wanted to let you know that not only have I not abandoned this blog project, I’m planning to do a lot more blogging in 2020. I ended up taking a mostly-hiatus from blogging this year both because I got totally overloaded with work in the spring (too much teaching, too much service, hosting a big workshop and expo for the Reinventing Civil Defense project, etc.), and because I needed to get my book totally finished and out the door. But that’s all done now, so I’m looking forward to getting back into things. Lots of exciting things will be happening in 2020, including the publication of my big article on Truman and the Kyoto decision, the publication of my book (Restricted Data: Nuclear Secrecy in the United States), and some other things I can only mysteriously hint at for the moment!
In the meantime, I wanted to announce that an article I’ve been working on for a long time has finally appeared in print: “John Wheeler’s H-bomb Blues,” in the December 2019 issue of Physics Today. It’s a Cold War mystery about an eminent scientist, a secret conspiracy, and six pages of H-bomb secrets that went missing on an overnight train from Philadelphia to Washington, DC.
There may never be a good time to lose a secret, but some secrets are worse than others to lose, and some times are worse than others to lose them. For US physicist John Archibald Wheeler, January 1953 may have been the absolute worst time to lose the particular secret he lost. The nation was in a fever pitch about Communists, atomic spies, McCarthyism, the House Un-American Activities Committee, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and the Korean War. And what Wheeler lost, under the most suspicious and improbable circumstances, was nothing less than the secret of the hydrogen bomb, a weapon of unimaginable power that had first been tested only a month before.
You can read the article for more. If you’re interested as to why I wrote it, see this short blog post I wrote for Physics Today as well, which talks about how one gets ahold of Cold War FBI files of famous physicists (it helps if they are dead).
Aside from its mysterious vibe (and lurid details, like Wheeler peering at a stranger on a toilet), one of the wonky things I like about this paper is that for me it serves as sort of an approach to the old historiographical question of, “do individual details matter in history, or does the larger context matter?” You can see variations of this debate all over the place, such as the “Great Men vs. Cultural History” takes.
The photographs of Wheeler from his FBI file. Everybody looks pretty bad when they’ve been microfilmed.
For me the answer has always been both — history is both the idiosyncratic details (and individuals), but it is also about the broader shifts. And for me the really interesting moments are when those two levels of scale interact. This story, in which a single person loses a tiny amount of paper, and huge consequences result, is an example of what I mean by that “interaction.” Wheeler losing the documents does matter in a broad sense (spoiler: it sets off the Oppenheimer security hearings, which have long-standing ramifications for Cold War science), but it only matters because there is a context in which it can matter (a national security state and international situation that imbues six pages of writing with catastrophic meaning). If those six pages of H-bomb secrets were magically transmitted to almost any other historical context, they’d have been meaningless.
But enough on that. What I also wanted to share with you here are some interesting documents, things referenced in the article but not easily available anywhere else.
The initial memo about the “Wheeler Incident,” January 7, 1953.
First, here is a short (24-page) excerpt from Wheeler’s FBI file, which I received from the FBI in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. I’ve helpfully arranged it chronologically — full FBI files are a terrible, jumbled, repetitive mess that required a lot of careful reading and processing to make sense of. I’ve chosen documents that both illustrate the character and tenor of the “Wheeler incident” investigation, and give some hints as to how important it was seen at the time. The spindly handwriting on some of the pages (e.g., 11) is J. Edgar Hoover’s. (How did the man manage to be creepy in nearly every possible way? Even his handwriting is creepy.) I’ll be releasing the full FBI file sometime in 2020, along with other files in my collection of Cold War physicist FBI files, as part of a collaboration with the Center for History of Physics/Niels Bohr Library and Archives at the American Institute of Physics.1
Wheeler’s classified deposition to the FBI about the “Wheeler incident,” March 3, 1953.
Next, we have Wheeler’s March 3, 1953, deposition to the FBI. I’ve collated two versions of this that I have. Both are from the National Nuclear Security Administration, but they were redacted at different times and with slightly different priorities. The color one redacts more weapons information, the black and white one redacts information about FBI agents. If you put them together you get almost the entire story — some details about the lost document are redacted, but the big picture is there. As I’ve written about before, I sort of love the game of getting multiple, differently-declassified copies of documents and comparing them, not only because one feels like one is learning something forbidden, but also because it lets you get inside the mind of the censor a bit — you can see how different concerns lead to different removals.2
Dean’s letter of displeasure to Wheeler, April 1, 1953.
Next, I offer up Gordon Dean’s reprimand letter to Wheeler (April 1, 1953), telling him that he had been a very bad boy, but that they were going to look the other way. Considering the penalties for mishandling nuclear secrets include prison time and huge fines, an unhappy letter was pretty much a slap on the wrist. But as Dean told the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, “We do not see anything we can do above that at the moment. We still want him in the program. He is a very valuable man, and we do not know anything else we can do without cutting off our nose to spite our faces.”3
The cover page of Walker’s “Policy and Progress in the H-bomb Program,” January 1, 1953.
Finally — and this is perhaps the real prize here — I offer up a complete (redacted) copy of John Walker’s “Policy and Progress in the H-bomb Program: A Chronology of Leading Events” (January 1, 1953), the conspiratorial H-bomb history that Wheeler was consulting for, and lost several pages from. This was the bureaucratic weapon that was meant to show that Oppenheimer et al. had slowed down the H-bomb program, and is more or less a chronology of work and thought on the H-bomb, with extensive quotations from documents and reports. It is at places heavily redacted. But it’s still pretty interesting on the whole. Reader beware: this work of “history” is biased inasmuch as it does not present full context of the documents and opinions it quotes. As a result is heavily favors Teller and Wheeler’s views of things. Teller in particular wrote many overly-optimistic memos about how easy it would be to make an H-bomb, which nobody but Teller agreed with. But because his memos dominate the record on this, when you put them all in a list, without discussing their problems and shortcomings, it can look like a very strong case. For that context, Gregg Herken’s Brotherhood of the Bomb and Richard Rhodes’ Dark Sun are much more recommended! But this still is a useful document.4
OK, that’s all for now. I may have one more post in 2019 (about why NUKEMAP switched from Google Maps to Mapbox), but otherwise I will see you in 2020!
- Document source: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Freedom of Information Act request. [↩]
- Document source: National Nuclear Security Administration, Freedom of Information Act requests and FOIA Reading Room. [↩]
- Document source: Papers of Gordon Dean, Records of the US Atomic Energy Commission (RG 326), Box 2, “Classified Reader File, 1953.” [↩]
- Document source: Records of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (RG 128), Series 2, Box 60, Legislative Archives, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. [↩]
I was a student of Wheeler’s, and though I spoke with him at length about his career and role in the U.S. nuclear program, I never had the heart to ask him about this incident while I had the chance. I appreciate your rigorous investigation.
You mention: “The FBI even showed Wheeler photographs of people who had been at rallies to protest the imprisonment of the Rosenbergs in the hope that he might recognize one of them from the washroom. He did not.” One detail I’ve read elsewhere was that Wheeler’s train was full of people protesting the Rosenberg case who were presumed to have communist sympathies. It was thought that some might even be Soviet agents. Can you elaborate further on that aspect of the investigation?
As Gregg Herken related (in relation to this article, and an interview with Borden he did many years back):