Redactions

Conant on the Role of the British in the Manhattan Project

by Alex Wellerstein, published March 21st, 2012

The Manhattan Project was a joint effort to build the atomic bomb between the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. In practice, most of the labor, expense, and manpower came from the United States, and the degree to which the UK and Canada should be equal partners with the US in the bomb project was a controversial subject.

The British were instrumental in prodding the US into serious action with the MAUD report, and the Canadians had uranium. But should that be it? This was the question in late 1942, when the US program was undergoing a massive transformation. Prior to 1942, the American effort was primarily a research program, trying to answer the question of whether atomic bombs could be built in a reasonable amount of time. From late 1942 onward, the effort shifted to a production program, an all-out effort to try and produce an actual bomb for use in the war. Would the British be let in on this later phase? Did the United States need the British?

Not really, thought James B. Conant, President of Harvard, chairman of the National Defense Research Committee1, and close friend of Vannevar Bush (director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which was the civilian side of the Manhattan Project). This week’s document is a letter from Conant to Bush from December 1942, outlining the many reasons he thought that the US should essentially abandon the British at that point in the work:2

Click image to view full PDF.

Conant implored Bush to clarify the matter of UK participation before the full-scale bomb project, run by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, got under way, “for it will be clearly difficult to continue to have complete scientific interchange on the one hand and restricted development interchange on the other unless the arrangement is carefully spelled out, for the line between research and development is nebulous, and the same people are often involved in both.”

For Conant, the decision had to be completely pragmatically. The was “presumably one one reason” to share secret military information between Allied nations, “namely, to further the prosecution of the war in which both are engaged.” The question was, would sharing all information with the British do this? He thought not. The British were not producing fissile material, for example, so “our passing our knowledge to them [in that subject] will not assist the British in any way in the present war effort.” So under this scheme, the British would only get to participate in the parts that they themselves were working on which would actually get them closer to making an atomic bomb during World War II. Which is to say, bomb design, reactors, and plutonium would be left out of the story for the British. (“If there be any national rights in this whole area ’49’ [code for plutonium] may be said to be a strictly U.S. invention.”)

Would there be complications? Conant acknowledged that if they cut the UK out at this point, Canada might deny them heavy water. That would be annoying, but not a deal-breaker. They might also deny them uranium ore, which would be a somewhat more dicey procedure until the US was sure of its access to domestic supplies. (They had a considerable amount of high-value ore from the Belgian Congo, but this was insufficient for the entire project.) The British, of course, would “certainly be displeased,” but Conant concludes that “there would be no unfairness to the British in this procedure.”

What would be the advantage to the US in doing this? Conant says simply that it would help with secrecy:

The advantages of restricting all further information to the United States is obvious. Secrecy could be more easily controlled. We are not just reaching the point where the advances are military secrets of the first order of importance.

Conant and Bush were also worried that the British interest in participating in the bomb project had nothing to do with the current war, but with an eye towards scientific and commercial prestige in the postwar period. Conant does not mention this here, though.

There would be many more salvos on this front as Conant and Bush frantically tried to persuade Roosevelt not to let the British into the full, new Manhattan Project. At one point, Bush thought he had convinced FDR of the soundness of this measure.

But however persuasive Vannevar Bush could be, he couldn’t match up to Winston Churchill. By mid-1943, Churchill had convinced Roosevelt that full cooperation was the only true path, and the Quebec Agreement was (secretly) entered into. Not only would the British get access to American research, and send a delegation of scientists to Los Alamos, but they would get to have equal say on whether the bombs themselves were used, and whether the US could share the information with any other countries. In practice, though, the British were nearly completely kept out of Hanford (James Chadwick visited it once), though they learned much about plutonium through their work at Los Alamos. The Canadians founded labs at Montreal and Chalk River, but were more or less excluded from American information by General Groves.

Conant would eventually embrace the Quebec Agreement as well. But his initial reason for wanting to keep the British out — because of the difficulty of controlling secrecy — proved exactly correct. It was, after all, Klaus Fuchs, a member of the British delegation to Los Alamos, who proved to be the most significant of the wartime atomic spies. Of course, he was wrong the British had nothing to contribute: the British delegation (including Fuchs) made major contributions towards the practical realization of the bomb while at Los Alamos. So maybe it all evens out.

  1. Note that at this point, Office of Scientific Research and Development had taken over most of the responsibilities of the original NDRC. The NDRC became the “NDRC of the OSRD” at this point, which meant that it was merely an advisory body of the OSRD. [↩]
  2. Citation: James B. Conant to Vannevar Bush, “US-British Relations on S-1 Project” (14 December 1942), in Bush-Conant File Relating the Development of the Atomic Bomb, 1940-1945, Records of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, RG 227, microfilm publication M1392, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C., n.d. (ca. 1990), Roll 2, Target 4, Folder 9, “S-1 British Relations Prior to Interim Committee, [Fldr.] No. 1 [1942].” [↩]

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Visions

Classification In-Jokes

by Alex Wellerstein, published March 16th, 2012

One of the really noticeable difference between the Boston and DC areas are the advertisements on their public transportation systems. In Boston, the majority of the ads were either for getting another educational degree, or asking if you wanted to be a paid participant in various medical/clinical studies. When you’re already in that town to get a lofty educational degree, you’re sometimes tempted by the idea of getting paid to not sleep for a week. Or maybe it would just be more of the same? Har har! Grad school jokes!

In DC, a huge number of the ads are for lobbying purposes — most of which invoke horrible consequences that will befall children, jobs, Israel, and/or the entire United States should Congress or the President not do something that somebody wants them to do. It’s unclear to me whether this sort of advertising works, or, at least, what it means to “work” in these circumstances. Surely the wheels of government are so well-greased by money that mere subway ads can’t have too much of an effect on how the representatives vote? And we all know nobody in DC is going to write in to their elected representatives, on account of the fact that we don’t have any. (None who can vote, anyway.)

My favorite series of ads, though, are basically only comprehensible for people with connections to the world of security clearances. I think people in most parts of the country might assume that a web site with a name like “Clearance Jobs” might mean “jobs that are available wholesale” (not so bad) or “jobs at a significant markdown” (hmm) or maybe even “jobs that are two seasons old and thus nobody wants” (not so good).

Out here, of course, it means “jobs for people with security clearances.”

This site has advertised a lot over the past few months with variously cryptic slogans. Here’s my favorite one, snapped at the Navy Yard Metro station a few weeks ago:

Real Analysts Do It In a SCIF

A SCIF is a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. You know in the spy movies when they go into the special room that is completely cut off from the outside world, guaranteed un-bugged, where the really sensitive stuff is discussed? Well, it’s sort of like that, but like most things associated with secrecy, they’re probably a lot less exciting than they sound.

If you don’t know what a SCIF is, you probably aren’t attracted to the job. If you do know what a SCIF is, you’re either feeling smug about your knowledge of the in-joke, or a little disturbed by the idea of analysts “doing it” on top of a classified laptop. Or maybe it’s just me.

The truth is, of course, that Smart Analysts Do It in a Cone of Silence. Har, har! I’ll be here all week, folks!

Update: I happened to be on a train with another one of these on my way home today:

How Was Your Day? Oh, I (redacted)

Har har! Get it? His or her job is classified so they speak in big redacted passages. Well, there you go. (Sorry for the blurriness — moving train+bad lighting+poor cell-phone camera.)

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Redactions

Atomic Access Categories from 1947

by Alex Wellerstein, published March 14th, 2012

The English word “secret” comes from the Latin sēcernĕre, meaning “to separate, divide off.” Secrecy is the dividing of the world into those who know and those who don’t. With every act of separation comes an act of classification — you designate what is to be divided out, what is to be separated, what is secret.

So it should come as no surprise that so much of the work of secrecy is creating ever more baroque and detailed categorization schemes.

This week’s featured document is a case in point: a lettered list of categories of access to specific nuclear secrets, probably from sometime in 1947.1 It is a Borgesian encyclopedia of sensitive nuclear knowledge.2

Click image to view the full PDF.

It’s an odd jumble of a list — some of the categories are categories are about access to knowledge, some to places, some to things.

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  1. The document is undated, but its position within the file, and several specific details in the document, lend towards my guess at the date. Additionally, from its contents it is clear that it is postwar because it discusses stockpile storage issues — not a problem during the Manhattan Project, since none were being stockpiled — and assigns permission for that to General Groves, who would then have been head of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project. It refers to the Army Air Forces (AAF), which suggests it is not later than September 1947, when the US Air Force was split into an independent organization. The mentioning of Silverplate and the C-97 modification at the end suggests that it is in a window where B-29s are still be used, where the C-97 is being fielded, and the B-50 is not yet around, which also fits snugly into 1947. [↩]
  2. Source: Undated, untitled list of classification categories (ca. 1947), Manhattan Engineer District (MED) records, Records of the Army Corps of Engineers, RG 77, National Archives and Records Administration, Box 64, “Security and Intelligence.” [↩]

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Meditations

Fukushima: Is it “Nuclear Secrecy” or Just Capture?

by Alex Wellerstein, published March 12th, 2012

Two very different stories have been setting off my “nuclear secrecy” Google Alert switchboard for the past two weeks.

The first is Iran and their alleged secretiveness as an indicator of their alleged bad intentions. I’m still wrapping my head around that one.1

The second is the Fukushima accident, which has hit its one-year anniversary. It’s not something I’ve talked about on here before, and this post is something of an explanation of why.

Fukushima first-year dose estimate by the NNSA, via the US Department of Energy

There is little doubt that the Japanese government failed to disclose the severity of the accident as it was happening, or the potential outcomes that were within a realistic possibility. Tepco, the power utility that runs Fukushima, similarly has developed a strong reputation for non-disclosure or selective-disclosure.

All of which brings back some grim memories of the Soviet Union’s lack of disclosure surrounding the early days of Chernobyl. By comparison with these two nuclear accidents, Three Mile Island, even with the cacophony of contradictory information that was released, seems like a comparatively open event in retrospect.

I don’t lump any of these incidents, though, under the heading of “nuclear secrecy.” Why not?

For me, what makes nuclear secrecy an entity worth discussing is not that it happens to be secrecy that applies to nuclear technology. Rather, it’s the secrecy that surrounds the specific security implications associated with military and dual-use nuclear technologies: in the end, it’s about the bomb, not just nuclear qua nuclear. The ability to concentrate “absolute” military power into a small package has changed the international order — and various national orders — since 1945. The locating of the source of that newfound political power in knowledge — instead of, say, materials or industrial know-how, for example — was the first step towards settling on information control (secrecy) as the form of its control. Why this was so, and whether it was a good idea, or even worked, is the subject of my overall research and the (someday) forthcoming book. But it’s this Hobbesian use of the bomb as the ultimate argument for secrecy that makes nuclear secrecy an interesting thing, above and beyond the bureaucratic secrecy that clusters around all complicated organizations, or the somewhat more banal forms of generic military secrecy or diplomatic secrecy.

Nowhere is this “special” nature of the bomb more explicit than in the United States, where the restricted data legal concept (after which this blog is named) actually carves out a completely parallel classification system for information related to nuclear weapons, above and beyond “normal” defense secrets.

The bomb might seem like an overly specific case, focusing primarily on weapons production methods, designs, and stockpiles. But a tremendous amount of other information “devolves” into these three categories. Example: Nuclear reactors originally fell into all three categories, because they were used to produce plutonium, they gave you information about nuclear properties that were for awhile considered classified, and because knowledge of American reactor operations could help you estimate the size of the US plutonium inventory, and thus the stockpile. There are far more amusing examples, of course: the amount of toilet paper used by a secret site, for example, can help you get estimates as to the personnel levels there, which can then be traced back to the amount of material or work being produced, and so on.

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  1. How secret is “secretive”? Does the Qom facility count as secretive because it wasn’t immediately disclosed? What’s the IAEA requirement for when you disclose a facility — at what point in its construction/planning? Are the Iranians any more secretive about these things than anyone else? Does having another state assassinating your scientists justify additional security/secrecy? I’m still mulling. [↩]

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Visions

Where’s the General Looking? (1945)

by Alex Wellerstein, published March 9th, 2012

Just after the “Trinity” test, in July 1945, General Leslie Groves headed back from the New Mexico desert to Washington, D.C. There he met with Ed Westcott, an Oak Ridge photographer, who was told to take a portrait of the General looking at a map of Japan, determined to win the war. It would be part of the materials released to the press along with Truman’s announcement after the use of the bomb.

Westcott, despite documenting the construction and life at Oak Ridge in some detail, didn’t know that the end goal was making the atomic bomb. He asked Groves to look at Tokyo on the map, which had been recently firebombed. Groves supposedly replied, “I’ll look somewhere else.”1

Here’s the resulting photo, from the Library of Congress:

General Groves looking at Japan (?), by Ed Westcott, July 1945.

Where’s the General looking? According to Westcott, he later realized that Groves was looking at Hiroshima.

But is he? I’m not sure. It’s very hard to see Groves’ iris in the above photo, even at the maximum resolution available from the Library of Congress (who has the highest resolution scan that I was able to find).

Let’s look at it a bit closer.

Above is a crop of the above photo at the maximum resolution, so you can play along at home (click to enlarge).

Is Groves looking at Tokyo? Probably not. Here’s what the angle of his eye would have to be to be looking there:

Groves looking at Japan – Tokyo angle.

Seems a little low to me. What about Hiroshima?

Groves looking at Japan – Hiroshima angle.

Possible? Maybe. It’s still a pretty low angle, though not as bad as Tokyo.

If his iris was dead in the middle of his eye, this is the result:

Groves looking at Japan – middle angle.

Vaguely looking into China? Looking at Manchuria? (That would be ironic, given the role that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria plays in debates over the importance of the atomic bomb towards accomplishing Japanese surrender.)

What if the iris was instead not centered, but slightly raised in the eye — that is, what if Groves was looking up slightly rather than centered or down? We end up with this:

Groves looking at Japan – upper angle.

Is General Groves looking at Russia? Now that’s an interesting possibility!

Here’s a very simple interactive version of the above — click on the image to draw your own laser lines! (Not tested in all browsers.)

I welcome any reader interpretations/speculations warmly. (None of the above is meant to be conclusive — I just don’t think there’s enough visual information in that photo to tell, frankly.)

Update: Stan Norris, author of the Groves biography, Racing for the Bomb, wrote to say that Westcott had wanted to photograph Groves on July 17, just after Groves returned from New Mexico, but Groves put him off and it isn’t clear exactly when the photo was taken. The relevance? Over those few days after “Trinity,” Groves was trying to put Kyoto back on the target list — as is pretty well known, it was removed at the personal request of Secretary of War Stimson, on account of it being a center of Japanese cultural heritage — only to be vetoed repeatedly by Stimson. The finalization of the target list — Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, Nagasaki — did not take place until the end of July. So that adds a bit to the possibility that Groves was not necessarily looking at Hiroshima directly.

  1. Rachel Fermi and Esther Samra, Picturing the Bomb: Photographs from the Secret World of the Manhattan Project (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995), 167. [↩]

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