Meditations | News and Notes

A decade of Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog

by Alex Wellerstein, published November 7th, 2021

Ten years ago today, I posted my first entry to Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog. It’s trite to remark on how quickly a decade can fly by… but it’s still amazing to experience it. I thought that I would mark the occasion by writing down some thoughts on the history of the blog, some general thoughts on academic blogging, and some thoughts on the future of this blog. I apologize for the length and self-indulgence in this sort of thing. I don’t expect it will be of particular interest to most readers, but perhaps to other academics (especially those just starting) who look at this blog as some kind of “success” will find the story interesting. You can skip to the very end if you want to know about the future.

Me, six months before I started the blog, at my Harvard History of Science Commencement ceremony, with my main Harvard advisors, Peter Galison and Sheila Jasanoff. This was when I was trying out having a light beard in order to both fit in better at the Kennedy School, and also to look a little older. These days I do not try to look older, it comes naturally.

When I started this blog in 2011, I was a postdoc at the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics (AIP). I had gotten my PhD the year before, and had spent another year at Harvard on a postdoc/lecturer gig. So going to AIP, near Washington, DC, was a big change — and a welcome one. I had enjoyed graduate school quite a lot; despite the many anxieties and difficulties associated with both the educational experience and the total collapse of the economy (and the academic job market, esp. in History) a few years before, it was still an overwhelmingly great experience. I met a lot of great people there (many life-long friends), and got to experience the rare joy of learning about new things for their own sake for many years on end. As time goes on I increasingly recognize how rare that sort of environment is in our world. 

But AIP came with its challenges as well. I did not have many academic colleagues at AIP; there were a few other historians, and it didn’t have the same kind of rich intellectual atmosphere as Harvard (which is not its fault; it is a different sort of institution and organization). I didn’t know too many people in DC, and it was quite a big up-rooting from the seven years I had spent in Cambridge. It was very exciting to live in DC during the Obama years, and there is an impressive DC-based history of science and technology community, but I had to really work to feel integrated into it. The up-shot of AIP was that they gave me a ridiculous amount of autonomy (thanks Greg Good). I had a lot of ability to spend my time as I saw fit, with the main caveat being that in three years the fellowship would necessarily end and I would be back on the (dismal) academic history job market again. So I had a lot of freedom, and a lot of opportunities, but I did sort of feel like the characters in Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, with a big timer counting down before my eyes everywhere I looked. 

When I say the history job market was bad after 2008, this graph is an evocative indication of what I mean. This is the latest iteration of the so-called “graph of doom” from the American Historical Association, showing the number of new PhDs (orange) compared to the number of advertised academic jobs (blue) in the field of history. Obviously there are jobs for history PhDs outside of the academy not represented by that blue line, but almost everyone who gets a PhD in history dreams of an academic job in it (and those jobs outside of the academy are not as plentiful and easy to get as optimistic recruiters might make them seem). I would also draw your attention to the situation in 2004, when I started my PhD, and 2010, when I finished it — quite a different situation! And note as well that the job market has never really recovered from 2008. There are a lot of reasons for that. In 2004, I remember them telling us about how to play multiple job offers off of one another; in 2010, the advice I was given was literally “find a cave to hide in for a few years.” Source: AHA Jobs Report 2021

I started the AIP job in the late summer of 2011. That November I went to the annual History of Science Society meeting, which is my “main” academic professional society, and my favorite meeting (because I have so many friends who also attend). I was honestly feeling pretty low. I had missed my friends, and I was feeling adrift. The problem with absolute freedom and autonomy is that you have to make your own discipline and structure. That is not really something I was very good at (I’ve gotten better over the years); I did best when I had some kind of base structure of expectations to work within (and diverge from) rather than being told to just figure it out myself. I wasn’t feeling very productive, and I wasn’t sure what I ought to be doing.

I had a really productive conversation at HSS with Karen Darling, then acquisitions editor for history of science at University of Chicago Press. I really wanted to publish my first book with them, on the history of nuclear secrecy (which was the subject of my dissertation). Karen basically told me that I ought to think about what I wanted the book to “do” for me. Did I just need it to get a job, or to serve as my main tenure contribution? Did I want it to be read by people outside of my field? Did I want it to try and change the discourse about the topic? Did I want to become the “go to” person on nuclear history?

These were not questions I had really considered before; I sort of saw the book as a natural thing to do, but wasn’t really thinking about it in functional personal or career terms. It also made me realize that I needed to really think functionally about how I was going to end up with a job at the end of the postdoc. Senior scholars had told me, you need to just finish your book and put out some articles. But academic books and articles are slow — how many could I realistically get “in the pipeline” before I needed that payoff? — and they also could take years to have an “effect” on the academy in a field like history (it is not “fast-paced” like the sciences can be). My goal, as I conceived it, was for the people reviewing my job applications to know my name before they read my application. How could I do that while also working on articles and the book?

A dignified picture of myself in DC, from December 2011. Don’t ask me.

I came away from HSS thinking that what I want to do is plant a flag: I wanted to stake out some territory in this field, declare loudly that this was what I was doing and was interested in, and eventually get this book done.1 The dissertation was very long and I figured I would need to cut a lot of interesting things from it, and I thought it would be nice to have a place to put those leavings (it never really ended up working that way, though).

So I decided that starting a blog was the way to go. Even in 2011 that was a little behind the times; people were already talking about blogging as an outmoded activity (the discourse was sort of how people talking about starting a podcast at the moment — oversaturated field, likely audience and success quite small, return on investment of time probably low). But I figured it couldn’t hurt. It would give me an opportunity to practice writing about this subject, it would give me a place to off-load a lot of the interesting things I was finding and talking about (a function that in grad school had been fulfilled by talking to my academic friends about it), and it would perhaps alert others (esp. in the DC area) to the fact that I existed and knew some stuff. I was somewhat inspired by Jeffery Lewis’ blog, Arms Control Wonk, which everyone I knew in the nuke world read, and it appeared to me that he had figured out a way to side-step the standard academic hierarchy of Big Schools with Big Names and Big Journals and Big Resumes to create something that simultaneously elevated his own expertise (by demonstration) as well as played a role in “the discourse.” 

It’s perhaps hard to express now, to any regular reader of the blog, how obscure I was in 2011. I was known by some other historians of science, especially those who did nuke things. I had published a well-placed paper on the history of Manhattan Project patenting practices (itself a very anti-climatic experience — this came out in the biggest journal of my field, and I got a total of one e-mail from someone saying, “hey, I saw your paper, and it was really interesting!” That particular someone became one of my first academic friends in DC, as an aside — thanks, Leo!). I had managed to parlay that paper into an appearance on NPR’s Morning Edition, which was super exciting. But the people who knew me were mostly academic historians of science, which is not a huge crowd. 

The first two weeks of blog posts as seen in the post archives — three per week! In November 2011 I published 11 blog posts!

The blog by itself did OK at first. Not great. But OK. My early posts ranged in quality; I was really feeling out the genre. I gave myself an insane goal for content-creation: three posts per week. Monday would be some sort of general think-piece (“Musings”), Wednesday would be focused on a document (“Redactions”), and Friday would be something visual (“Visions”). I had a lot of documents and images, so I figured those would go pretty easily, and that I could use the “Musings” to look at larger issues. I had some people who started reading regularly, but it was still fairly niche. 

The thing about a schedule like that (three times a week) is that it re-wires your brain. In my academic writing and research I take years to finish a paper. I couldn’t do that on the blog; I needed “content” almost daily. So my brain started looking for content everywhere. Every time I saw something interesting (in my research, at a talk, in the newspaper, on the subway, wherever) my brain would start to click: “that could be the basis of a post.” It was a really radical change in thinking about my subject matter. It was not the one that is encouraged in programs of study for academic history, where long-simmering interest is the name of the game (which I love, as an aside — I really do think you get different results spending years thinking about something, as opposed to days). I had a real burst of creativity as a result, just constantly trying to turn my every odd thought into something “useful.” It would even motivate me to do things I probably wouldn’t have done otherwise. Need content? Go to a talk that looks interesting and write about it! Get off your seat and go to the archives! Go through the documents on your computer one more time and look for something interesting to write about! 

Anyway, one of the things that came out of this was NUKEMAP. There are various versions of the story of how and why I made NUKEMAP (all true to one degree or another, but as any historian — or journalist — will tell you, there are different ways to tell a story), but it is worth saying here that the initial impetus was caused by this search for blog content. I did not expect NUKEMAP to become as big as it became. Not in the slightest. I thought it was a cool little thing to do, and I made the first version over a weekend (which should impress upon you how easy it was to make, not that I am some master coder or anything). But then it blew up (the inevitable pun) in a big way, and started driving huge amounts of traffic to my blog. If 10,000 people a day use NUKEMAP (which is what it is like on a “slow” day) and 1% of those people discover my blog for the first time, then that’s 100 potential new blog readers seeing it per day. That’s huge for an academic. As it is, the blog itself could also get thousands of people per day at that point, depending on the topic, and that was just because more eyes had been drawn to it. (Today, the blog gets about 1,000 visits a day despite the fact that I rarely update it. Not huge numbers by Internet standards, but by standard academic standards, that’s massive.)

Gradually it became clear to me that the blog and NUKEMAP were the ticket to the functional success I was looking for. It really was getting my name out there. It also felt like it underscored the accuracy of the theory I had been working with regarding using the Internet to create a different sort of academic success. The number of people who read my “big” article on nuclear patenting seemed pretty small — aside from people working on almost-the-same topic, or some unfortunate graduate students who were forced to read it in a few seminars, I felt like I could count on my fingers the number of people who knew what it said. But NUKEMAP was not only getting famous in newspapers and on places like Reddit, it was feeding back into the academy and even the policy world. I was getting invited to give all sorts of interesting talks; I was becoming known as a “nuclear historian” well outside of my home discipline. Which you might think would induce some kind of impostor syndrome, but long ago (at Harvard) I realized that pretty much everyone was just faking it until they made it, so I had already internalized that it was OK if I was doing that too.2 

The cover of the Restricted Data book

Did I mention my book was now out? Did I? If I didn’t… it’s out! This message brought to you by my publisher, who had to (patiently) wait a decade for this book.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that I got invited to give a talk at a university I had never heard of, the Stevens Institute of Technology, about NUKEMAP (thanks Ed Friedman and Charles Ferguson). While I was there I also became aware that they had a job opening that might be a good fit for me (thanks John Horgan and Lee Vinsel), and I applied for it, and (barely) got it, and so the blog actually did the job I set out for it to do. The book that was in theory one of the motivations for this blog, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States, was published by the University of Chicago earlier this year. And as of this fall, I have tenure. So it all worked out — in fact, it worked out much better than I would have guessed, if you had asked me in 2011 what I thought the “best-case scenario” would be. I’m still kind of in awe of that, and well-aware that a lot of that was luck (that is, completely beyond my control — even the popularity of the NUKEMAP had more to do with a few UK tabloids deciding to make a much bigger deal of it than was warranted early on than anything I did). 

Of course, the irony is that the more successful I became, the less I blogged. Now we’re down to a single blog post every few months. It’s not a coincidence, of course. When I started the blog, I had almost zero responsibilities. Now I have lots. I am a Program Director, meaning that I advise students and attend Curriculum Committee meetings and now that I have tenure I work on the Promotion and Tenure Committee and etc. etc. etc. I also teach and grade and so on. And success creates more work: I have grants for (very cool) projects, but those all take time (not just research time, but also administration, budgeting, applications, etc.). So the hours I have in a day to spend on any research-like work are much constrained from the beginning. (What I don’t have are children — by choice — so my day is still way more free than most academics’.)

On top of that, my options for publishing have increased. If I find a topic that seems like it is really promising, publishing it on my blog is really the least attractive option for it at this point. I’d much rather turn it into a “real publication,” something that could be seen by a wider audience and count much higher on my resume (because despite wanting to get around the traditional academic hierarchy, I am still largely rewarded — tenure, grants, etc. — by things that show up in the traditional resume). So I could have published my latest article on the Tsar Bomba on my blog, but publishing it with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists would both give it a wider audience (and it would look a lot better, both visually and editorially, because other eyes would be on it first), but would also give it more credibility than “just a blog post” (as my blog posts are sometime sneered at). I can usually find a higher-profile venue to publish my work these days (this was not the case earlier in my career), so the temptation is always to just do that, now. Of course, I do write blog posts after something comes up elsewhere (and I like having that option), but in the end I spend a lot less time thinking about the blog than I used to when I think about publishing. 

Lastly, as my blog audience got larger, I started feeling more pressure to perform. Many of my early posts were very light and easy — here’s a document, look what it says, how neat! Look at this image, it’s amazing, huh! I wouldn’t really feel like that was “cutting it” these days, and so when I do spend time to write a blog post, I feel the need, internally, to spend a lot more time on it. I’m aware-enough to realize that’s kind of a nonsensical trap: there is certainly an audience of people who would be perfectly happy with shorter posts (if you’re reading this one, good on you), and some of my favorite blog posts of yore are pretty short and sweet (I still love this one on Oppenheimer’s eye color; very short, very simple, but there’s a semi-profound historical point buried in it, maybe). But this is why many of the posts that I have made in the last few years have been pretty long and over-wrought. And, of course, if I am feeling like I need to make it “worthwhile,” that easily dovetails into the “other venues” issue — if I am going to spend that much time on something, maybe I want to see if I can get it placed somewhere more prominently? 

My first blog post on 11/07/2011, began with this image of the Greenhouse Item shot (1951), with its natural question-mark appearance and eerie turquoise glow. I still really love this image as a representation of the nuclear unknown. Here is the version of the file I used in my calendars a long time back, which has been edited to remove dust spots, cropped to make it centered, and upscaled a bit, but is otherwise unedited from the version I scanned at the NARA Still Pictures division over a decade ago.

OK, you’ve read this far, and I want to sketch out a little bit about the future. What lies ahead? Here’s what doesn’t lie ahead, first: I’m not writing this as a “coda” for the blog. I still enjoy writing on it. I sometimes forget how much I enjoy writing on it; it’s a really different tone and idiom than my other writing. I can write directly to you. That still feels intimate and good. I can write a little longer than I ought to and nobody really complains (queue complaining). I can abuse em-dashes and semi-colons and not worry about it too much. I can tackle historical issues that are interesting to me but not quite at the level of “I should write a ‘real’ article about this.” And I feel, with a blog, a little bit more like I’m interacting with a community of people, as opposed to just “broadcasting” at them. So I like that, and I intend to keep that as a thing in my life. I can’t guarantee that I will be able to manufacture time for blogging — my “dance card” is pretty booked for the next couple of years in terms of big projects — but I’d like to transition back to having more short-and-sweet posts if I can. (Knowing me, they will probably not be all that short in the end.) And now, pleasantly, the blog doesn’t have to do the career “work” it did for me in the past. It can just be what it is. And I’m looking forward to that. 

So here’s to the next decade of Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog. This is, according to the blog software, the 290th post on the blog (29 blog posts per year is not bad, even if it has dropped off in recent years); I still have, somehow, 134 draft posts. Most of those will never see the light of day for good reasons, but even if I didn’t come up with another new post idea, I’m sure there’s more to be had. Thank you for reading, whether you’ve been there from the beginning, or are just starting with this post. (If you are in the latter category, the post archives are the best way to navigate older topics.) I am unendingly grateful for those of you who have been with me on this journey so far, and feel like I owe what success I have to all of you. Thank you. 

  1. “Planting a flag,” as I call it, was how I made friends in college as an undergraduate as well. UC Berkeley is a huge school and it is hard to know where to start when looking for people to socialize with, especially if you are temperamentally odd (“weird” is the word people have always independently come up with to talk about me and my obsessions), but I found success in joining (and eventually taking over) a large campus club that was devoted to “weird” conversations (it was sort of a philosophy club, but with an emphasis on discussions that included non-philosophers, and I really endeavored to try and make very a ideologically diverse group of people find it interesting and worthwhile). So I was essentially trying to replicate that, in retrospect, online: declare loudly what I think is interesting and then see who flocked to it. [↩]
  2. I call this “reverse impostor syndrome” — I’m an impostor, but so is everyone else, so it’s OK. [↩]

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Redactions

“The possibility of bigger bangs”

by Alex Wellerstein, published October 29th, 2021

I’m excited to announce the publication of a new article of mine in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: “An Unearthly Spectacle: The untold story of the world’s biggest nuclear bomb.” As the title suggests, it’s about high-yield nuclear weapons. How high? “Very high” — which was the US jargon for weapons with yields above 50 megatons. It’s research I’ve been working on for many years now — you can see some of my early exploration into this on this post from 2012… how the time flies! — and I’m excited for it to finally see the light of day. (Let nobody ever accuse me of rushing to press too quickly…)

I had really wanted this article to be a visual feast, and I’m super pleased with how the Bulletin presented it. Special thanks to their multimedia editor, Thomas Gaulkin, for the nearly all-nighter I suspect he put in on this.

The article is really two intertwined histories. The first is about the development of the famous “Tsar Bomba,” the 100-megaton monster bomb tested (at half-power) on October 30, 1961. Everyone who knows about nukes has heard about the Tsar Bomba, but the histories of it in English have always had a sort of sketchy, judge-y quality to them. They’re about Soviet posturing and a little bit about Sakharov racing to complete the bomb, but I was really taken with the accounts one gets when reading Russian-language sources, which not only paint a much more colorful and human picture, but fill in a lot of interesting details. I wanted to make it something like a real history, with its deeper context. Of course, it’s hard to do that with the sources available in English, but a veritable bounty of internal histories and memoirs were produced in Russia at the end of the Cold War, and many of these are now (thanks to the Internet) very easily accessible (if you can read enough Russian to navigate them).

For example, the massive casing of the Tsar Bomba was developed for a totally different design in 1956 (RDS-202), which was just the stock H-bomb technology at the time with more fuel (it was an RDS-37 with enough fuel to get 20-30 megatons). This plan got scrapped, but the casing was kept in storage. Later, in 1961, the Arzamas-16 scientists decided that they could use their by then much more advanced H-bomb tech (they had a breakthrough in 1958 called Project 49, which seems to have really improved their efficiency) to make a 100-megaton bomb in the same casing as before (RDS-602). This work involves scientists who are important to the Soviet H-bomb project but a lot less famous than Sakharov, notably Yuri Trutnev (who recently died) and Yuri Babaev.1

Attaching of the Tsar Bomba to the belly of its bomber in the still-dark hours before the test. The military did not want spotlights to be used while they did this, but the filmmakers charged with making the documentary about it explained they wouldn’t otherwise be able to see it. They were given exactly 20 minutes to shoot it. This account comes from the head of the documentary crew Vladimir Suvorov, who wrote a memoir (Strana Limoniya) in 1989, and is just one of the many Russian-language memoirs and official histories I used to pull together this new account (it is linked to in the BAS article’s footnotes).

You can read the article for more, but I tried to write the history of the Tsar Bomba the way we would write the history of an American bomb development — not by just constantly pointing out the idiocy of the people involved, but trying to describe what they did within the context of their time and thinking. And I also stumble across some very interesting details about the internal design of the Tsar Bomba (it appears to have had two primaries, one at either end of the casing — this was totally surprising to me, since the common wisdom is that multiple primaries would be almost impracticably hard to synchronize).

The article then segues into the second history: the US response to the Tsar Bomba, and this is based on documents I’ve been collecting for a decade or more. Publicly, the US denounced the weapon, declared it pointless and exclusively political in nature, and said it didn’t need such things. Privately, in secret, it explored very seriously the idea of making 50-100 Mt bombs, and contemplated even higher yields (1,000 Mt and up). I contextualize this within US nuclear thinking about “very high yield” weapons, which goes back as far as 1944, but was extremely prevalent in the late 1950s, when the US pursued a 60-Mt bomb with some enthusiasm. And, as discussed previously on the blog, Edward Teller had long been interested in, as he put it in a classified meeting in 1954, “the possibility of bigger bangs” — weapons in the range of many gigatons.

A rendering I made (in Blender) showing the relative size of various “superbomb” bomb casings (and a little silhouette of me, for scale). On the left are the biggest bombs (for their eras) that the US deployed, showing how dramatically the US was able to steadily pack megatons into less mass/volume over time. On the right are the “superbombs”: the Tsar Bomba, of course, but also the BTV and Flashback Test Vehicle, which represented different approaches to Tsar Bomba-range yields by the United States. These are bomb casings the size of small school buses. I was really pleased with how the render came out; fortunately, bomb casings are pretty easy to render as 3D models (they are essentially just deformed cylinders, and are basically symmetrical).

One of the really interesting things that I was able to integrate into the story are two remarkable bomb casings called the Big Test Vehicle (BTV) and the Flashback Test Vehicle (FBTV). These were brought to my attention some years back by Scott Lowther on his blog. They are just ridiculously large casings, and the files made it clear that they were associated with Restricted Data, but other than that it was hard to parse out exactly what they were. 

I am excited to have figured it out. Basically, after all of the discussion about making 50-100 Mt bombs in the early 1960s, the US decided that it would rather sign the Limited Test Ban Treaty, even if that meant that they would be missing out on “very high yields.” (It’s extremely hard to test a bomb that is only 1 megaton underground — the depth of burial requirement to avoid venting is very deep, but it’s doable if you really want to. It is totally impractical to test a 50- or 100-Mt bomb underground.) But they really feared that the Soviets would ditch the LTBT without much notice, like they did with the Test Moratorium in 1961. So part of their “safeguards” against the Soviets doing this was to have a program they called “Readiness to Test,” later abbreviated as just “Readiness,” which meant that they would be able to test a lot of nukes within 90 days of the Soviets breaking the LTBT. This was seen as a deterrent.

The BTV and FBTV were part of the Readiness program, developed by Sandia. They were essentially ballistic casings, fuzing arrangements, and parachutes that a nuclear device could very quickly be inserted into. So the US could prepare to atmospheric test without actually testing: they’d be able to make the measurements they wanted and do the logistics of dropping the bombs and so on without a lot of prep time, should the decision to test go forward. Sandia developed a lot of interesting hardware for the Readiness requirement: the UTV (Universal Test Vehicle) was basically a B-53 casing that could have other devices swapped into it; the CTV (Companion Test Vehicle) was a sort of mini-bomb casing that could carry diagnostic equipment; the EMPTV (EMP Test Vehicle) carried EMP-related diagnostic equipment. (They also did a whole slew of other Readiness-related work, like preparing to test nuclear weapons in outer space. It was a big program.)

The impressively unwieldly-looking Big Test Vehicle (BTV). Just a monster of an ugly bomb casing design, optimized for perfectly fitting into a B-52’s bomb bay. Photo is from Sandia National Laboratories.

The BTV was created as the largest bomb that could fit inside of a B-52 bomb. It’s a pretty ugly thing, and it’s hard to imagine the ballistics were anything other than horrible. It existed only so they could test truly gigantic weapons, ones that could not fit inside the (already very large) UTV casing. In terms of timing, it was commissioned at exactly the same time that the AEC declared that they could make a bomb with pretty much the exact same dimensions at 100 Mt. So it seems pretty clear that this was part of their “hedge” for testing a 50-100 Mt bomb design.

The Flashback Test Vehicle was definitely part of such a program. It was created as part of something called Project Breaker, which is such an annoyingly common word in nuclear/technical matters that it fouls search queries pretty effectively. But I managed to piece it out using the journals of Glenn Seaborg:

1. “Breaker.” Howard read a proposed letter to the President seeking the approval of air drop ballistic tests of a ballistic a ballistic shape for [a] very high yield nuclear weapon. Howard explained that the matter had been delayed by revision by him of the letter to make it clear that the ultimate development and tests of this particular weapon for B-52 or B-70 delivery could justified primarily on the effects information which such a test would provide — that is, the effects of such a weapon if used against the U.S. Presumably such a test would also develop counter-measure information. Howard said that the original letter prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff had endeavored to justify the test on the grounds of the need to develop such a weapon for use in the U.S. stockpile, but that Howard felt, upon careful examination, that the reasons were not persuasive and that a good case for an offensive weapon was not made. The Commissioners concurred again in the desirability of a ballistics test, noting that the sheer size and shape of the ballistics dummy bomb would almost certainly result in being seen and in there being some speculation about it. Therefore, they felt it was probably necessary, for that reason as well as others, to clear the matter with the President. In addition, however, I expressed the concern that the way the letter now read it tended to imply that perhaps a decision was being taken on the question of a large weapon, when in fact this drop test program constitutes and expedient quite apart from a basic policy decision; and that it would be better if the letter were to identify the need for a policy decision, noting that a research and development and testing program that would be involved in the event that such a policy decision were taken in the affirmative.

It should be made clear that project ‘Breaker’ does not imply a decision to actually build and test a B-52–deliverable nuclear effects device.” (Later Howard re-drafted a paragraph in long hand, and read it to the Commission and received their approval.)

This is from late 1963 or early 1964 (the ambiguity is because my only access to this is through Google Books’ Snippet View, and it doesn’t let me see; I have tried to explain to Google that this is a government document and in the public domain, but apparently the bots that monitor those inquiries weren’t convinced). But it clearly indicates that the FBTV was part of maintaining the possibility of testing a “very high yield” nuclear weapon (which is code in this period for 50-100 Mt; for even higher, they sometimes used the term “ultra-high yield”). The FBTV was large-enough that it didn’t fit inside a B-52; you had to remove the bomb bay doors. Ironically, this is exactly what the Tsar Bomba required, though the US probably didn’t know this in the 1960s.

The Flashback Test Vehicle, hanging inside a B-52 that has had is bomb bay doors removed to accommodate it, as part of the Readiness program. I don’t know whether I find Flashback or the BTV more ridiculous looking. Flashback at least looks like a bomb… but its size is just absurd, and it is almost comical how generically bomb-like it is. It makes the Tsar Bomba’s casing look somewhat reasonable.

Anyway, they did several exercises with boring names (Operation Paddlewheel is one of them) with the BTV and FBTV, basically checking if they could drop them successfully and also take a lot of photographs and diagnostics of them (they did things like take simulated flash and fireball measurements), so that if in the future they were asked to make a 50-100 Mt bomb, they could do so quickly. President Johnson seems to have put off making a decision on whether he might want a 50-100 Mt bomb; my guess is that he got bogged down with other things (Vietnam). As an aside, by the late 1960s, Sandia was suggesting that they could just fill the BTV up with conventional explosives and drop it on the Vietnamese, which gives some sense that they were beginning to suspect they were never going to use it for a “very high yield” weapon. By the late 1970s the idea was 100% dead, and Sandia donated some of the specialized equipment they made to move the BTV to NASA, which also needed to move large things.

I’m proud of this article and I hope you enjoy it. I really love a good mystery and piecing together this history has really been that — it’s an area that is still very redacted despite the fact that there doesn’t seem to actually be a lot of interest in “very high yield” nukes after the 1960s (though some have speculated that the Russian “Poseidon” nuclear drone might be something like that, so who knows). So it’s required quite a lot of reading-between-the-redacted-lines, finding multiply-, differently-redacted copies of documents, and following code names through different contexts (e.g., Flashback to Breaker).

This is one image that I worked on for the article but we ultimately decided not to use, because it didn’t really fit and (in my opinion) the color scheme is kind of jarring (it would be nice to remake it with different color data). But I figured I would share it here. You can use NUKEMAP to export KMZ mushroom clouds (in the Advanced Settings) that can be opened in Google Earth Pro, so I rendered the mushroom clouds of various sizes of relevance. (I included the W80 and Mk-17 in part just to show what happens as you increase orders of magnitude from 15 kilotons).

It’s not the end of this story or line of research — there’s more to say about both the Tsar Bomba and “very high yield” nuclear weapons pursuits by the US — but with the 60th anniversary of the October 1961 test looming, it felt like it was the time to try and push out some of it. I’ve also tried to make almost every aspect of the documentation available to readers, with lots of documents linked-to in the article footnotes. And the Russian-side of things could not have been accomplished without the amazing book library put up by Rosatom a few years back. I’d also like to thank Scott Lowther, Carey Sublette, and a former undergraduate research assistant, Ksenia Holmes (who helped me trawl through many of the Russian sources, but any translation errors are mine alone), for their various contributions and assistance.

In a little over a week is the 10th anniversary of this blog, if you can believe it (I can barely believe it). I will be posting something about it, so watch this space. Don’t worry — I’m not announcing a blog retirement! Also, if you want a signed copy of my book, the arrangement I’ve made with my local bookstore, Little City Books, is still (as of Fall 2021) active. 

  1. One little thing that I’d have added to the article if I had known it before it went to press: Pavel Podvig related an anecdote on Twitter about the question of the Tsar Bomba’s final yield (the US estimated it to be higher than 50 Mt, the Soviets thought it was 50 Mt). Sig Hecker was part of a US team of weapons scientists that visited Russia and met their counterparts, and was given a tour of the Soviet nuclear museum that contains a Tsar Bomba casing. Yuri Trutnev, one of the main scientists involved in designing the Tsar Bomba, was giving his tour. Hecker said: Yuri, you know, our estimates were that it was 57 Mt.. To which Trutnev turned to him and, said, “Sig, it doesn’t matter”… [↩]

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Redactions

The leak that brought the H-bomb debate out of the cold

by Alex Wellerstein, published June 14th, 2021

In September 1949, the United States unambiguously detected radioactive residues which indicated that the Soviet Union had, some weeks before, detonated their first atomic bomb. President Truman was initially inclined to keep the discovery secret, to avoid panic among Americans and their foreign allies, but was convinced by his advisors, including an impassioned David Lilienthal, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, that this was folly. The Soviets, they argued, would likely be announcing it soon anyways, and it would look better for the US to show that it was on top of things and unruffled by these developments. Truman finally agreed, and released a short statement indicating that an “atomic explosion” had taken place in the USSR (he was deliberately coy on whether it was a bomb or not), and indicating that this was entirely in accord with expert predictions about Soviet capabilities (not entirely true, but not entirely false).1

"Reds Have Atom Bomb: Truman," screams the front page of Newsday for September 23, 1949

Extra, extra, read all about it! You’ve got to love the appearance of these old dailies…

What should the US response be to the loss of its nuclear monopoly? This question raged in the weeks afterwards. One of the proposals, led by Edward Teller and championed by AEC Commissioner Lewis Strauss, was to push for an even bigger weapon: the “Super,” or hydrogen bomb. The Super would dwarf fission weapons, it was believed, and show the American people, America’s foreign allies, and America’s foreign enemies who exactly was in charge. As momentum grew behind this still-secret push for a “crash” H-bomb program, opposition emerged. J. Robert Oppenheimer and the AEC’s General Advisory Committee would, in late October 1949, issue a scathing report that condemned the idea on technical, policy, and moral grounds. Not only would a crash program divert vital resources from the US fission weapons program at a crucial time (and they not only did not know how to make an H-bomb in 1949, they didn’t even know for sure that it could be built), but a world with H-bombs would ultimately be more dangerous for the United States than the Soviets (because the US keeps so much of its people and wealth in large, concentrated cities on the vulnerable coasts), but a weapon in the megaton range was potentially a weapon of “genocide” (their wording), and thus not compatible with American values.2

This “H-bomb debate,” as it was and is called, was originally completely within the secret sphere. The fact that it was taking place was not known to the broader public, despite its weighty potential implications for the nation. Eventually, on November 1949, it would leak to the public. The way in which that happened is one of the most bizarre and absurd situations in American nuclear secrecy — and I describe it in my NEW BOOK, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (obligatory plug!).3

A photograph from the set of Court of Current Issues, October 1948. I don’t have any photographs of the episode in question, but this gives a sense of what it might have looked like. Source: Cornell Capa for TIME/LIFE via Google

What happened is this: on November 1, 1949, at 8:00pm Eastern Time, a television show called “Court of Current Issues” aired on the WABD-TV (New York) and Dumont Television Network. The show was essentially a debate program, framed as a courtroom in which various experts would argue as if they were prosecuting the “current issue” as a court case. This episode’s subject was: “Is there too much secrecy in our atomic program?”

The “witnesses” included two scientists (Hugh Wolfe, physicist of Cooper Union and chair of the Federation of American Scientists, and Harrison Brown, physicist at the University of Chicago), a science journalist (Michael Amrine, who was also a staff member at FAS), an FBI agent (Edward Conroy, of the NYC office), a Manhattan Project security officer (Col. William Consodine, former Manhattan Project head of security and intelligence, and one of the technical advisors for the bizarre MGM Film, The Beginning or the End?), and, importantly, Senator Edwin Johnson, Democrat of Colorado and member of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, the key Congressional committee with oversight of the US nuclear program, which was itself pushing hard in favor of building the H-bomb. 

“Is there too much secrecy in our atomic program?” Find out for yourself by reading the transcript of Senator Johnson’s comments.4

No recording of the episode has survived; indeed, according to Wikipedia of the entire 3 year run of the show, only one 14 minute fragment (of an episode from March 1949) survives to this day. But we do have a transcript of part of the show (linked above), because the company Radio Reports, Inc., transcribed the episode and sent it to the Atomic Energy Commission, no doubt per a contract they had with them to monitor such things.

Consodine, the security officer, and Amrine, the journalist, acted as the “lawyers” in the debate, examining and cross-examining the “witnesses.” The scientists said there was too much security in the present atomic program, the FBI agent and Senator Johnson said there was not. During Consodine’s questioning of Johnson, he said a number of things that frankly would have counted as leaks at the time. When asked about how tight Soviet security was, Johnson explained that: “Russian security is airtight. Very little leaks from there. As a matter of fact, we haven’t been able to get anything through, and we have some of the greatest experts in the world with big ears who’d like to know something about and not even a whisper comes through the iron curtain, not a whisper.” (Any statement on what intelligence capabilities the US did or didn’t have — even a misleading one, and this is somewhat misleading — would have been classified at the time.)

In his cross-examination, Amrine put to Senator Johnson the question that, if the point of nuclear secrecy was to keep the Soviets from getting the atomic bomb, and the Soviets now had it… didn’t that mean we might not need the secrecy with them anymore? Since they knew the secret? Shouldn’t the US relax its secrecy since, as he put it, “the main cat out of the main bag?” Johnson disagreed strongly: “I don’t think you can be strict enough with that sort of thing, because lives of millions of Americans hang in the balance and because the scientists all have a yen, like some old fisherwoman, to tell all we know… The scientists have a passion for telling everything that they know.”

Amrine then asked Johnson that if the Soviets knew how to make an “atomic pile” (nuclear reactor), why shouldn’t we declassify our own program on the same subject in order to advance it? Johnson’s reply was a bombshell, if a rambling non-sequitur (emphasis added):

I’m glad you asked me that question, because there’s the thing that is top secret. Our scientists from the time that the bombs were detonated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been trying to make what is known as a superbomb. They’ve been devoting their time to two things: one, to make a superbomb, and the other, to find some way of detonating a bomb before the fellow that wants drop it can detonate it. And we — we’ve made considerable progress in that direction. Now, there’s no question at all that the Russians have a bomb more or less similar to the bomb we dropped on Nagasaki, a plutonium bomb. Our scientists are certain that they have that bomb, but it’s — it’s not a better bomb than dropped at Nagasaki. Now our scientists already — already have created a bomb that has six times the effectiveness of the bomb that was dropped at Nagasaki and they’re not satisfied at all; they want one that has a thousand times the effect of that terrible bomb that was dropped at Nagasaki that snuffed out the lives of — of fifty thousand people just like that. And that’s the secret, that’s the big secret that the scientists in America are so anxious to divulge to the whole scientific world.

Johnson said a lot of things that he shouldn’t have. Even mentioning that there was some research done into “pre-detonating” a bomb would have been classified (I don’t know anything about this, but it would be entirely unsurprising that this idea was looked into). He claims that the US had developed a bomb with “six times the effectiveness” as the Nagasaki one — this is a bit of hyperbole for late 1949, no matter how you slice it, but still a subject he would not have been permitted to speculate about or discuss, since it pertained to results from the recent Operation Sandstone test series.5 And identifying the Soviet bomb test as being a plutonium implosion device was also at that moment quite classified, because it would have revealed fairly plainly how the US actually determined the Soviets had tested a weapon (it points to radiological analysis, as opposed to, say, seismographic observation). 

But of course the real amazement comes from the line about the “Superbomb.” If they relaxed the secrecy, Johnson argued on television, the scientists would tell you that they are working on a weapon with a thousand times the yield of the Nagasaki bomb, and that is the “top secret” that would be let out… thus letting it out.

Senator Edwin C. Johnson looks over the shoulder of President Harry Truman while the latter signs a bill, July 31, 1946. Source: Harry S. Truman Library and Museum. Amusingly, Johnson takes the same pose in another photograph a few days later, when Truman signs the Atomic Energy Act of 1946.

The absurdity of the situation is remarkable. Could Johnson have really been so self-unaware that he did not see the contradiction inherent to announcing on television the information that you are arguing needs to be kept “top secret”? I mean, he was a Congressman, so anything is possible. Could he have done it on purpose, in order to bring the H-bomb debate to the public? It’s tempting to suspect that — especially in light of what happened afterwards, which I’ll get to in a moment — but frankly when I read the transcript, it doesn’t at all look like some pre-mediated leak. It looks like a rambling statement meant to win an argument.

Interestingly, in the rest of Johnson’s “testimony,” he does aver to secrecy at one point — when Amrine asks him about the possibility of radiological warfare (which is identified by Johnson and Consodine as a “top military secret,” even though the possibility of it was not exactly secret at that point and was, as Amrine noted, explicitly mentioned in the Smyth Report). Maybe too little, too late? The only other aspect of the “testimony” of interest is on Civil Defense — which had not really gotten started in the United States, but would soon — in which Johnson noted (more sensibly than much else that he said) that if you tell people to get prepared for atomic war and then it never happens, they may end up losing interest in it.

Remarkably, Johnson’s leaks weren’t immediately picked up more broadly. Television was more ephemeral then than it is today (hence we have no footage of it), and it’s possible that it might have been ignored altogether — aside from the AEC’s transcription practices — had not, over two weeks later, that an article ran about it on the front page of the Washington Post. Johnson was quoted in the article saying everything that he had said came from “public sources” and “simple logic” which was clearly (and self-evidently!) false.6

The front page of the Washington Post, November 18, 1949, featuring the discussion of Johnson’s leak. I always find looking at historical newspapers fascinating because of the juxtaposition of stories. Here you’ve got the Loon weapon system (an early cruise missile evolved from the V-1 rocket) on the left, two B-29s colliding midair at bottom right, and a mysteriously poisoned cabbie at bottom left, with H-bomb secrets smack dab in the middle!

As an aside, the editorial writers for the Post were also puzzled by what Johnson could have been thinking: “Whether Senator Johnson supposed that this telecast was strictly off the record or that the entire audience had been carefully investigated and cleared by the FBI, we cannot say.” On Johnson’s claim that scientists had a yen for gossip, they quipped that: “Of course, the scientists knew about atomic energy long before Senator Johnson had ever learned to distinguish a neutron from a neurosis, and no one ever found about it from eavesdropping a television program.” They concluded that Johnson ought to “preach what he practices.”7

In any event, from that moment on, the “H-bomb debate” was a matter of public record, and sources inside and outside of the government weighed in on whether the United States should or should not pursue this new possibility. And this infuriated Truman. David Lilienthal met with the President that day and noted in his diary that “the President was mad as hops, [and he] started off by cussing Johnson and the Joint Committee out.” Truman immediately demanded that the Joint Committee plug their leaks. But more leaks would come about the nature of the “Super,” and the discussions behind had behind the cloak of secrecy. Finally, Truman asked the National Security Council to give him a recommendation on the “Super” question. They argued in favor of making the bomb (but not as a “crash” program, per se). Lilienthal argued against it, and Truman’s reply to him, as Lilienthal recalled in his diary, was telling: “we could have had all this re-examination quietly if Senator Ed Johnson hadn’t made that unfortunate remark about the super bomb; since that time there has been so much talk in the Congress and everywhere and people are so excited he [Truman] really hasn’t any alternative but to go ahead and that was what he was going to do.In other words, the Johnson’s leak — as bizarre as it is — probably is what led Truman towards making a decision on the H-bomb in the first place, forcing his hand because the matter had taken on such a public stature (and the general public, and Congress, were extremely favorable with regards to the idea of the H-bomb). Such is the power of selective information release in a regime of secrecy!

It had one other consequence, as well. Truman’s official statement on the H-bomb question, made on January 31, 1950, carefully says that “I have directed the Atomic Energy Commission to continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or superbomb,” deliberately not making it sound like the work hasn’t already been taking place, or that it is a “crash” program. Along with this, he issued a Top Secret directive to the AEC which said the same thing as the public one, except for one additional clause at the end: “I have also decided to indicate publicly the intention of this Government to continue work to determine the feasibility of a thermonuclear weapon, and I hereby direct that no further official information be made public on it without my approval.” Truman put a “gag” order in place on the H-bomb, no doubt an additional bit of fallout from Johnson’s disastrous leak. 

Obligatory plug: If you want more on the H-bomb “gag” order, check out chapter 5 of Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2021), which talks about it in detail! 

  1. The story of the US detection of and response to the Soviet test is very well-told in Michael Gordin, Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin and the End of the Atomic Monopoly (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009). [↩]
  2. This is a highly-abbreviated presentation of the arguments of the H-bomb debate; for a much longer and comprehensive one, see Peter Galison and Barton Bernstein, “In any light: Scientists and the decision to build the superbomb, 1942-1954,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 19, no. 1 (1988), 267-347. [↩]
  3. And, of course, as I look up the section in the book that describes it, I notice it has a typo on it! Sigh… on page 219, it should say “November 1949” where it instead says “November 1950” on the first sentence of the page. Fortunately it is rather clear from the context before and after, as well as the footnote, that this is a typo… but still. Argh! These sorts of things are like a dagger to the heart. [↩]
  4. Radio Reports, Special for the Atomic Energy Commission, “Senator Johnson Charges War-Time Atomic Security Lax [transcript],” Radio Reports, Inc. (1 November 1949), in Office files of David E. Lilienthal, Records of the Office of the Chairman, Records of the Atomic Energy Commission, Record Group 326, National Archives and Records Administration, Archives II, College Park, MD,  Box 16, “Radio—Matters, Re.” [↩]
  5. Operation Sandstone, in 1948, tested several design approaches — including levitation and composite cores — that increased both the explosive power of the stockpile and increased the efficiency of fuel use, which allowed for some radical increases in yield and an increase in the number of bombs available. From 1949-1952 or so, these changes were being implemented in the stockpile and would eventually lend to some truth to the “6 times more efficient/explosive than the Nagasaki bomb,” but in late 1949 this was still not totally implemented. [↩]
  6. Alfred Friendly, “New A-Bomb Has 6 Times Power of 1st,” Washington Post (18 November 1949), 1. The Post article claims the delay was because they did not receive the transcript until then, and that the television station had declined to release the transcript for publication until it could get permission from all people who had participated, which it could not obtain. The Post doesn’t then elaborate how it got it, but it sounds like it got leaked to them from someone at the company or — less likely, in my view — the AEC. [↩]
  7. “Sen. Johnson on secrecy,” Washington Post (21 November 1949), 10. [↩]

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Redactions | Visions

How not to redact a warhead

by Alex Wellerstein, published May 17th, 2021

The job of the document reviewer is the job of a censor: they look at documents that might be released and, based on a declassification guide and their own judgment, decide what should be made public and what should not. Today such redactions are usually done with computer programs like Adobe Acrobat, which has an apparently rigorous “redaction” mode that allows you to essentially draw white boxes over a page and have the data underneath them be totally expunged, like so:

A redacted page from John Wheeler’s deposition to the FBI from March 1953 about his lost H-bomb document.

As you can see, this approach renders the background an impenetrable white, and allows the redactor to indicate the FOIA exemption under which they have declared the information unreleasable (in this case, DOE b(3) means the Department of Energy has determined that this falls under FOIA exemption b(3), which means that another law prohibits its release; in this case, probably the Atomic Energy Act of 1954).

In the past, the methods for redaction varied, including — my personal favorite — actually cutting out the offending material with a razor. I find the literalness of this approach quite appealing, especially since (as I describe in my book) the Latin root of the word “secrecy” is a word meaning “to cut.”

Figures for initiator production have been snipped out from this report of a 1947 meeting of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee. 

But redaction is always fraught with problems, as I have written about before. Different redactors apply different judgment, even when looking at the same guidelines. A removal can actually draw attention to information, as opposed to hiding it, especially when multiple copies of the same document are available to compare. And so on. 

But rarely does one find such impressive examples of “redaction gone wrong” as in a 1999 report by Los Alamos National Laboratory about the future of the US nuclear weapons stockpile.1 The report is part of Martin Pfeiffer’s excellent archive of documents, many of which are re-scans of materials released by the National Nuclear Security Administration decades ago but whose online copies got corrupted years ago by sloppy data practices.2

In this particular report there are lots of redactions that were made by simply putting a piece of white paper over the censored information and photocopying it. This isn’t a terrible way to redact… if the photocopier’s contrast settings are high enough that none of the censored information won’t be copied through the paper. But as you can see, even from a casual glance, this was not the case:

A badly redacted document

My attention was drawn to this by someone on Reddit, who showed that it only takes a little manipulation of the contrast slider in photo editing software to suddenly show something that probably wasn’t meant to be shown:

Warheads... revealed!

Oops. There are other examples in the same file, but this is the major one — not only can one read much of the redacted text, but we’re given a rare glimpse inside of modern thermonuclear warheads. Now, there isn’t a whole lot of information that one can make out from these images. The main bit of “data” are the roughly “peanut-shaped” warheads, which goes along with what has been discussed in the open literature for decades about how these sorts of highly-efficient warheads are designed. But the Department of Energy doesn’t like to confirm such accounts, and certainly has never before let us glimpse anything quite as provocative about these warheads. The traditional bomb silhouettes for these warheads are just the dunce-cap re-entry vehicles, not the warheads inside of them.

Does this mistake cause harm, all these decades later? It’s hard to see how. The fact that these cases are shaped like this is not news; that these warheads had “peanut-shaped” cases has been known publicly since around the time of this document’s creation, and was part of the coverage of both the Wen Ho Lee trial and the allegations of Chinese espionage at Los Alamos in the 1998 Cox Report. Even if one could get a better sense of the above than the blurry, seen-through-tracing-paper version of the above, it isn’t likely that just such an external view of a warhead casing would be that useful, by itself, to an enemy power. (North Korea has developed its own “peanut” shaped thermonuclear design, and showed off its casing to the world already.) The difficulty in making such a weapon is not in knowing it can be vaguely peanut shaped, in other words. This kind of thing just isn’t “secret” anymore, in the sense of unknown. But it is still “classified,” in the sense that it wasn’t meant to be legally released.

Traditionally, these kinds of screw-ups are used by critics of secrecy and the nuclear weapons establishment to indicate what a joke the whole thing is. I don’t go quite that far — as I’ve said in the past many times, in any system where you have millions of pages of material being reviewed by dozens (if not hundreds) of different human beings, you’re bound to have a few mistakes. Some are going to be larger than others. It’s an inevitability.

A speculative image of the internal components of a W87 nuclear warhead, originally from US News & World Report, reprinted in the Cox Report (1999).

It’s also just not clear that these kinds of mistakes “matter,” in the sense of actually increasing the danger in the world, or to the United States. I’ve never come across a case where some kind of slip-up like this actually helped an aspiring nuclear weapons state, or helped our already-advanced adversaries. That’s just not how it works: there’s a lot more work that has to be done to make a working nuke than you can get out of a slip-up like this, and when it comes to getting secret information, the Russians and Chinese have already shown that even the “best” systems can be penetrated by various kinds of espionage. It’s not that secrets aren’t important — they can be — but they aren’t usually what makes the real-world differences, in the end. And these kinds of slip-ups are, perhaps fortunately, not releasing “secrets” that seem to matter that much. 

If anything, that’s the real critique of it: not that these mistakes happen. Mistakes will always happen in any sufficiently large system like this. It’s that there isn’t any evidence these mistakes have caused real harm. And if that’s the case… what’s the point of all of this secrecy, then? 

The most likely danger from this kind of screw up is not that enemy powers will learn new ways to make H-bombs. Rather, it’s that Congressmen looking to score political points can point to this sort of thing as an evidence of lax security. The consequences of such accusations can be much more damaging and long-lasting, creating a conservatism towards secrecy that restricts access to knowledge that might actually be important or useful to know.

(For more on these kinds of political effects, check out my new book, which discusses these kinds of dynamics in some detail! This final message brought to you by my publisher…)

  1. Military Applications Group, “The US Nuclear Stockpile: Looking Ahead,” Los Alamos National Laboratory (March 1999). [↩]
  2. See this footnote for a previous discussion of the corruption issue. I have never found a way to fix these files and am very grateful to Marty for taking the same to re-scan them all from hard copies. [↩]

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Meditations | News and Notes

In Memoriam: John Coster-Mullen (1946-2021)

by Alex Wellerstein, published April 25th, 2021

I received word recently that John Coster-Mullen passed away in the early hours of Saturday, April 24, 2021. He was 74 years old.1 He had been suffering from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neurodegenerative disease) for the past year or so, I have been told, and it had been a very difficult one as he lost physical and cognitive capabilities. He died peacefully, surrounded by his family, according to his wife.

Illustration of John Coster-Mullen and the Little Boy bomb, from a 2008 profile in the New Yorker by David Samuels.

Illustration of John Coster-Mullen and the Little Boy bomb, from a 2008 profile in the New Yorker by David Samuels.

I don’t know off-hand exactly when I started talking to John. A look through old e-mails suggests that in 2006 we had been talking, but that those e-mails reference earlier conversations. My guess is that we had been in touch in 2005, when I was working on my paper on how people draw atomic bombs. I had interviewed Richard Rhodes very briefly over the phone, talking about how the diagrams for Little Boy and Fat Man were made for The Making of the Atomic Bomb (they were drawn by his son), and Rhodes had mentioned John’s work and how amazing it was. Around that time I probably bought John’s book and got in touch with him, and we began exchanging documents as well. Around that time I was also working on my atomic patents work, and I sent some of those to him very early on as well, knowing he would appreciate them. 

Over the next 15 years or so, we exchanged quite a bit of documents, I acquired three versions of his book, Atom Bombs, and we got to spend some time together in person at the Atomic Heritage Foundation’s conference for the 70th anniversary of the Manhattan Project. He was always generous and excited. He clearly really enjoyed that he, a truck driver (among other things), was producing research that academics from places like Harvard and Princeton thought was important and valuable. 

One of the several copies of John’s self-published Atom Bombs I have. John never “finalized” the book, and was always updating it over the years.

I enjoyed John as a friend, correspondent, and as a subject of study. John is what I call a “secret seeker” in my book, someone who — for whatever reason — is driven towards learning “nuclear secrets.” I find secret seekers (in which I would include Chuck Hansen, Howard Morland, and Carey Sublette, among others) very interesting. Their motivations and methods vary quite a bit, as do their choice of subject. Hansen wanted to know everything of course, but Morland was focused on the H-bomb, and John the specifics of Fat Man and Little Boy.

While some secret seekers, like Morland, have explicitly political agendas in doing this (often related to exposing the futility of secrecy), for others that approach took a back-seat to other interests. With John, I never got the sense that he was strongly motivated by the politics of secrecy, though he sometimes could sound like that when he got irritated with the Department of Energy, or when he got annoyed when people would imply that he was doing something potentially dangerous. Sometimes he would give the old Ted Taylor line, that the surprising thing about the atomic bombs is that they aren’t that hard to build (if you have the fuel, etc.), but it always struck me that he was somewhat infatuated with the history of World War II, and the people who had made and used the bombs, and saw this as the tiny area where someone with his interests and skills could make a real contribution. I think discovering “the secret” for him was more about proving himself as a researcher than probably any big statement about secrecy. Over the years I’ve gotten various documents from him trying to explain himself, and to my eye they come down to a sort of love for the work, the topic, and the people — one that only grew over time and he had more exposure to all three. 

John would occasionally send me various ideas, documents, drawings as he updated his thoughts about the specifics of these bombs. My favorite is the above video that he sent me in 2008 (I don’t know when he made it, exactly) that he made by putting a snake camera inside a postwar Little Boy casing on display at the International War Museum. You can see it moving through the bomb casing from back to front. John would use this kind of hard-won, “nuclear archaeology” data to fill out the minute details of how these bombs were built. This was, for John, clearly a labor of love. It’s a weird thing to suggest that he loved these bombs and the men who made them, but I think he did. 

I respected John’s work a lot. His overall view of the bombings was very much in the standard, “they had to be done, they were a good thing” interpretation, but we could agree to disagree on such things. His technical account of the weapons, and of the procedures necessary to get them working, is unparalleled. His book is my reference for whenever I need the micro-level details of shipment and assembly of the weapons, or of design information relating to them. His book inspired me to write my piece on Nagasaki for the New Yorker in 2015; he had the best account of the chaotic details of that bombing that I ever had read. I suspect my interpretation of them was quite different than his! But our friendship and mutual respect could accommodate such differences in views. Stan Norris reviewed his book in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists over a decade ago, and put it so aptly:

Nothing else in the Manhattan Project literature comes close to his exacting breakdown of the bomb’s parts. Coster-Mullen describes the size, weight, and composition of many of Little Boy’s components, including the nose section and its target case; the uranium-235 target rings and tamper; the arming and fuzing system; the forged steel 6.5-inch-in-diameter gun barrel through which the uranium-235 projectile was fired at the target rings; and the tail section—to cite just a few.

John’s biggest “discovery” was that the Little Boy bomb’s internal workings were somewhat opposite of what everyone else had assumed in the “open community” for decades on end. Instead of a smaller projectile of enriched uranium being shot into a larger target of it to form a supercritical mass, it was the other way around: the projectile was the large part (a set of hollow rings), the target was the small part (a solid “spike”).

A diagram of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, by John Coster-Mullen.

One version of John’s depiction of the innards of Little Boy that he sent me (this one from 2017). He told me he drew these diagrams in MS Paint! The hollow projectile is labeled S; the target spike is labeled H. Most of the changes over the last few years were his interpretation of how the tamper pieces were put together.

The profile of John by David Samuels in The New Yorker from 2008 explains his evidence; the main idea was “leaked” to him by Harlow Russ, and it jibed with other data he had. I originally treated this as the same sort of “maybe” speculation that surrounds lots of nuclear topics, though several years later I found a document which to me totally cemented the idea as true (which, of course, I immediately sent to John, and he immediately added it to the hoard of documents in his book).2 John made it more fun for me to look at these detailed technical documents, because he gave me something new to look for.

Looking through my e-mails with John over the years, it’s plain how generous he was. He shared lots of things with me — not just documents and photographs, but texts of talks he was giving, comments from other researchers on his work, and even just silly e-mail forwards. He sent me the declassified guide on the fuzing system of the MK-3 atomic bomb that graces the cover of my new book. He would occasionally send me a new copy of his book if he thought my copy was too out of date. He sent me mysterious pieces of metal (bits of duraluminum, remnants of a non-nuclear bomb test, that he found in an unspecified desert), just as a little offering of friendship and camaraderie. He stayed in good touch until the last year or so; now I know why.

Here’s an excerpt from one e-mail sent in 2009. All underlining is in the original. It gives you a flavor for his working style, and the joy he took in this work.

Dear Alex,

Here is something to open up your eyes.  

I spent all day last month at the Atomic Museum in Albq during the 509th reunion. At the end of the day one of their researchers gave me a CD containing about 800 declassified photos; some old, some newly declassified. This is part of a set of 6 or 7 CD’s that LANL sent to all the museums a few years ago so they would have copies. These are low-rez thumbnails and I made a selection of several dozen that this person burned to a CD for me in their spare time and sent a few weeks later. I went through the thumbnail CD and found this one at about midnight one night. It reveals something spectacular and hitherto unseen.

I was quite shaken and think I woke all my neighbors with my startled yell.

Even a month later I’m still sitting here with my jaw in my lap. Picture TR-229 shows the inside of the tent under the Trinity tower with the sphere on the left (Slotin leaning against it) and the litter with the capsule on the right side. This litter is the one Daghlian and Lehr placed into the 1942 Plymouth in front of the McDonald Ranch. The litter is sitting on a crate with the wood box cover off and the completed Pu filled tamper cylinder sitting strapped to the litter. It can be clearly seen. I’m stunned!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

His work will live on. His wife, Mary, told me that his children are helping fulfill orders on his book still. John always resisted working with a publisher, both because he didn’t want to edit it down (as he feared he’d be asked to do), and also because it was never a finished project. Maybe now it’s ready to be typeset once and for all. We’ll see. 

Photograph of John Coster-Mullen by Alex Wellerstein, 2015

A photograph I snapped (with my terrible phone camera) of John in 2015, while I sat behind him at the Atomic Heritage Foundation conference on the 70th anniversary of the Manhattan Project.

My sense is that while I’m sure there was always one more detail to know, John basically accomplished what he wanted when it came to the history of Little Boy and Fat Man. He changed our knowledge of these weapons dramatically, and his samizdat book is considered quite authoritative on these matters. He never had a college education, but he got to give talks at universities, nuclear weapons laboratories, and rub shoulders with scholars and historical actors alike. He worked at this for nearly 30 years, and established himself as a generous, quirky, and unusual expert. I don’t talk about John much in my book — not as much as I’d like to, but there is only so much room — but I make a sideways acknowledgment that only in America could you have the phenomena of a truck driver whose hobby was to discover nuclear secrets. 

Rest in peace, John.

  1. From interviews and his Facebook page, I gather his birthday was December 21, 1946. [↩]
  2. The document in question is this one: C.S. Smith and I.C. Schoonover to J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Gun Fabrication Plan – Second Supplement to Memorandum of June 13, 1945,” (3 July 1945), Nuclear Testing Archive, NV0321050. It describes the final decisions about a small amount of cadmium plating that was put on the pieces of highly-enriched uranium to prevent premature fissioning. It describes a plating on the inner surface of the projectile and the outer surface of the target — something that only makes sense if the projectile is the hollow piece. [↩]

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