Redactions

Excerpts from the Klaus Fuchs File (1951)

by Alex Wellerstein, published January 25th, 2012

Recently — sometime in the last year — the FBI revamped its online FOIA Reading Room and replaced it with a new website called the FBI Vault. Somehow I missed this until just this week. The Vault contains all of the files the old Reading Room had, but adds a huge, new section on the Rosenberg Case. This is pretty great, both for Cold War historians, as well as a potential font for student papers. Along with those of the eponymous couple, these include the files of Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, David Greenglass, George Kistiakowski (misspelled online), J. Robert Oppenheimer (not his entire file), Morton Sobell, Harold Urey (not his entire file), among many others. Note that in some cases they are not the full files. Oppenheimer’s file there is just the parts that were considered relevant to the Rosenberg Case. It’s a lot of this-and-that, and not the full file by a long shot. Same with Urey’s and Kistiakowski’s files. At some point in the late 1970s, it seems that a number of files were either culled or grouped together with respects to a court order, and you can see evidence of this in the files as they have long lists of documents not enclosed, dated from 1978 or so.

Still, the Fuchs file is a full 9,923 pages (760MB!) of FBI-file-goodness, all conveniently in PDF format. It’s not quite identical to what I got by FOIAing the FBI a few years ago — the CD-ROM the FBI sent me had 839 more pages in it — but it’s still pretty impressive. (If you’re interested in downloading the files in bulk, I heavily recommend using a download manager, like Download Them All for Firefox. It makes downloading 111 PDF files a lot easier, even though it does still take some fiddling, since the FBI wasn’t entirely consistent with how it uploaded these files.)

Of course, the Vault site also contains the files of Groucho Marx, Liberace, and an 119 page file on “Louie, Louie,” the song (the FBI, like everyone else, couldn’t figure out the lyrics), so there’s no shortage of fun to be had there. I’ve added this resource to my long list of nuclear primary sources on the web.

This week’s document comes from the Fuchs file linked to above. Specifically, it’s an excerpt of a February 1951 report made by the FBI titled “Summary Brief on Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs,” related to “Fuchs’ Scientific Knowledge and Disclosures to Russians.”1

Click image to view the PDF.

Now this is, to me anyway, a pretty interesting document in and of itself. It compiles a lot of information about what exactly Fuchs claims to have given to the Russians. It’s limited, though, in part because of the fact that the British weren’t keen on giving the Americans unfettered access to Fuchs.2

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  1. Citation: Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Summary Brief on Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs” (12 February 1951), (Excerpt), in Klaus Fuchs FBI file, FBI Vault version. [↩]
  2. For a really terrific account of the tensions in the FBI-MI5 relationship regarding Fuchs, see Michael S. Goodman, “Who Is Trying to Keep What Secret from Whom and Why? MI5-FBI Relations and the Klaus Fuchs Case,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 3 (Summer 2005), 124-146. [↩]

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Meditations

More from the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy

by Alex Wellerstein, published January 23rd, 2012

A few weeks ago, I spent some time at the Legislative Archives in downtown Washington, DC, looking at the files of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE). It was my first time over there since I had moved to the area; I had been there a few other times over the years, but it’s really quite different when you actually live in the same town as the archive. It’s a less hurried, less harried, and less targeted experience: you can take the time to really look at things you might otherwise not have time for. Case in point: I actually got to spend some time talking with one of the archivists there, Bill Davis, who knows about the JCAE records. And last Thursday, Bill called me up to tell me that a new batch of newly-declassified JCAE Executive Hearings had arrived. How’s that for helpful? Of course I couldn’t resist, and swung by last Friday on my way to work.

JCAE members Sen. Vandenberg (l) and Sen. Hickenlooper (r) look over various documents at a 1949 hearing regarding the AEC.

The eight newly-declassified JCAE hearings are all from 1953, ranging from March to December. NARA isn’t in charge of declassifying them — these ones seem to have been declassified by someone at the CIA who is apparently just working his way through the decades-old queue.  I imagine some poor declassifier sitting there with a 100 foot pile of paper next to him. In reality, these appear to have been scanned and are redacted using what looks like Adobe Acrobat. But it is just a single fellow doing it, apparently — his name (Alan Lipton) is on every one of them as the declassifier.

1953 was an important year. For one thing, the Cold War was pretty hot right about then. The Korean War was still going on for most of it; the US had tested a hydrogen bomb prototype, but not an actual usable weapon; the Soviets set off a “thermonuclear weapon” (not Teller-Ulam, but still not very nice) that August; McCarthyism was still going strong. Tough times.

So what are in these files? Here are a few notes from them — they cover some interesting topics. Many of them deal with CIA in particular, which is of some inherent interest.

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Visions

Installing the Bomb

by Alex Wellerstein, published January 20th, 2012

Old bomb casings are just that perfect outdoor arrangement for your museum about war. And hey, let’s be honest: we’ve got quite a few of them left over from the Cold War. Might as well use them for something!

Today’s photo of the week is the installation of a Fat Man casing at the Los Alamos Science Museum:1

I love this photo for it’s wonderful contrast of tone, and the man-meets-bomb aspect. It also highlights how physically large the Fat Man bomb was, something that can get lost when you see photos of it in isolation. I’m not sure if the bomb is literally whitewashed here, or if that’s just how it looks in a black and white photo, but that’s a nice aspect, too.

Some more thoughts on atomic bomb casings and their public history follow after the jump.

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  1. Source: National Archives and Records Administration, Still Pictures Branch, 454-RF-30. [↩]

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Redactions

A Tale of Two Oppenheimers (1950)

by Alex Wellerstein, published January 18th, 2012

It’s hard not to dramatize the relationship between J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, and Frank Oppenheimer, uncle of the atomic bomb. Their lives were entwined in ways that went beyond the merely filial. Frank’s interests in physics were always overshadowed by his brother’s prowess; Frank’s dalliances with Communism may have been at the seat of Robert’s own political undoing.1

Frank Oppenheimer, 1948.

Robert’s life is well known: three years at Harvard, then to Europe, then to California, then to Los Alamos, then to Princeton, then to ruin.2 Frank’s is less well-known, but perhaps even more fascinating. Frank followed in Robert’s footsteps: he studied physics; he took up horseback riding; he was drawn to left-wing causes; he eventually became a Communist Party member, to Robert’s apparent dismay. He worked at Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory during the war, and followed Robert to Los Alamos, helping to plan for the Trinity test. In 1947, he was outed as a Communist — a charge he initially denies. By 1949, though, he admitted being a member in the 1930s.

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  1. Has it truly been a decade since Brotherhood of the Bomb  was published? I saw Gregg Herken give a talk about it  — and his thesis that Frank was the unnamed contact in the Chevalier episode — back in 2002, at UC Berkeley, when I was an undergraduate. And through consultation with my wife, I find out she was at the same talk! It may have been the first talk we both attended simultaneously, long before we began dating. How time flies for two nuclear geeks. [↩]
  2. Well, technically, then to the Virgin Islands, but from Sherwin and Bird’s description of how that was, it sounds pretty ruinous. [↩]

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Meditations

Assassination as Non-Proliferation: Historical and Sociological Thoughts

by Alex Wellerstein, published January 16th, 2012

Once again, somebody has been killing Iranian nuclear scientists. Iran blames the usual suspects (CIA, Mossad), which may be correct as far as I know. This is, according to the Times, the fourth such attack in the last two years.

As an historian, I’m struck with the fact that this is, as far as I know, a fairly novel mode of non-proliferation policy, if that is what it is indeed meant to be. I don’t want to speculate too much on the true motives of such a thing — there could be much deeper games going on here than are obvious on the surface of things. But let’s just pretend, for the sake of discussion, that it is indeed a state like Israel that is doing this with the idea of disrupting the Iranian attempts at a latent nuclear weapons capability.

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