Two weeks ago, I made a trip out to the West Coast to hang out with the various wonks that congregate at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute for International Studies. This was at the behest of Stephen Schwartz, who teaches a class over there and had me come out to talk to them about nuclear secrecy, and to give a general colloquium talk.

Stephen became known to me early on in my interest in nuclear things for his work in editing the book Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (Brookings Institute, 1998). This is one of these all-time useful reference books; it is the only book I’ve read, for example, that has anything like a good description of the development of US nuclear secrecy policies. And the list of contributors is a who’s-who of late 1990s nuclear scholarship. The book includes really detailed discussions about how difficult it is to put a price tag on nuclear weapons spending in the United States, for reasons relating both to the obvious secrecy issue, but also the fact that these expenses have not really been disentangled from a lot of other spending.

I’ve had a copy of the book for over a decade now, and it has come in handy again and again. I’m not a numbers-guy (NUKEMAP work being the exception), but looking at these kind of aggregate figures helps me wrap my head around the “big picture” of something like, say, the Manhattan Project, in a way that is often lost by the standard historical approach of tight biographical narratives. Of the $2 billion spent on the Manhattan Project, where did it go, and what does it tell us about how we should talk about the history of the bomb?

Here is a breakdown of cost expenditures for the Manhattan Project sites, through the end of 1945:

I’ve taken this chart from here. The “current dollars” are 2012 dollars, with a “production line” labor deflator used (out of all of the options here, it seemed like the most appropriate to the kind of work we’re talking about, most of which was construction).

To break the numbers down a bit more, K-25, Y-12, and S-50 were all uranium enrichment plants. Hanford was for plutonium production. “Special operating materials” refers to the raw materials necessary for the entire project, most of which was uranium, but also highly-refined graphite and fluorine, among other things. Los Alamos was of course the design laboratory. The heavy water plants were constructed in Trail, British Columbia, Morgantown, West Virginia, Montgomery, Alabama, and Dana, Indiana. Their product was not used on a large scale during the war; it was produced as a back-up in case graphite proved to be a bad moderator for the Hanford reactors.

I’m a visual guy, so I of course immediate start looking at these numbers like this:

Which puts things a little more into proportion. The main take-away of these numbers for me is to be pretty impressed by the fact that some 80% of the money was spent on the plants necessary producing fissile materials. Only 4% went towards Los Alamos. And yet, in terms of how we talk about nuclear weapons and the Manhattan Project, we spend a huge amount of the time talking about the work at Los Alamos, often with only token gestures to the work at Hanford and Oak Ridge as the “next step” after the theory had been worked out.

We can also break those numbers down a little finer, by turning to another source, Appendix 2 of Richard Hewlett and Roland Anderson’s The New World. There, they have costs divided into “plant” and “operations” costs:

They do not define how they differentiated between “plant” and “operations” expenses, but the most plausible guess is that the former are various start-up costs (e.g. construction) and one-off costs (e.g. big purchases of materials) and the latter are day-to-day costs (general labor force, electricity, etc.).

Looking at that percentage can tell you a bit about how much of the Manhattan Project was the building of a weapons production system as opposed to building three individual weapons. Nearly three-fourths of the expense was for building a system so large that Niels Bohr famously called it country-sized factory.¹

The K-25 gaseous diffusion plant: the single largest and most expensive Manhattan Project site.

Another way to look at this is to say that we usually talk about the atomic bomb as project focused on scientific research. But one could arguably say that it was more a project of industrial production instead. This is actually quite in line with how General Groves, and even J. Robert Oppenheimer, saw the problem of nuclear weapons. Oppenheimer, in testimony before Congress in 1945, went so far as to phrase it this way:

I think it is important to emphasize [the role of industry in the Manhattan Project], because I deplore the tendency of myself and my colleagues to pretend that with our own hands we actually did this job. We had something to do with it. If it had not been for scientists, there would have been no atomic bomb; but if there had been only scientists, there also would be no atomic bomb.

This is actually a very important point, and one which shines light onto a lot of other questions regarding nuclear weapons. For example, one of the questions that people ask me again and again is how close the Germans were to getting an atomic bomb. The answer is, more or less, not very close at all. Why not? Because even if their scientific understanding was not too far away — which it was not, even though they were wrong about several things and behind on several others — they never came close to the stage that would be necessary to turn it into an industrial production program, as opposed to just a laboratory understanding. That sheer fact is much more important than whether Heisenberg fully understood the nature of chain reactions or anything like that.

Why do we think of the bomb as a scientific problem as opposed to an industrial one? There are perhaps a few answers to this. One is that from the beginning, the bomb came to symbolize the ultimate fruits of scientific modernity: it was seen as the worst culmination of all of those centuries of rational thought. What grim irony, and what a standard story, that knowledge could lead to such ruin? Another reason is that scientific adventure stories are more interesting than industrial adventure stories. It is much more fun to talk about characters like Szilard, Oppenheimer, and Feynman running around trying to solve difficult logic problems in a desperate race against time, than it is to talk about the difficulties inherent to the construction of very large buildings.

Finally, though, there is the issue of secrecy. The scientific facts of the atomic bomb, especially the physics, were the most easily declassifiable. As discussed in a previous post (with many nods towards the work of Rebecca Press Schwartz), one of the main reasons the Smyth Report was so physics-heavy is because the physics was not terribly secret. Nuclear chain reactions, the idea of critical mass, the basic ideas behind uranium enrichment and reactors: all of these things were knowable and even known by physicists all over the world well prior to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The really hard stuff — the chemistry, the metallurgy, the engineering “know-how,” the specific constructions of the massive fissile-material production plants — was silently omitted from official accounts.

Looking at the costs of the bomb help rectify this perception a bit. It still doesn’t get us outside of the heroic narratives, for they are very appealing, but it can help us appreciate the magnitude of what is left out of the standard story.

1. Bohr reportedly told Teller upon seeing Los Alamos and hearing about the entire project: “You see, I told you it couldn’t be done without turning the whole country into a factory. You have done just that.”

First, there is this one, which clearly shows the classic picture of the “bent” Hiroshima mushroom cloud. The text below says:

This photo shows the destructive power of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. This photo was taken from B-29 in the air after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6. The atomic bomb’s horrendous destructive power can be understood by viewing this photo. As you see, this atomic bomb blast extended to a radius of 8 km, and the height of the bomb cloud reached about 14,000 m into the sky. The Japanese government said that Hiroshima was completely destroyed by the atomic bomb.

Masako Toki, who I had the honor of meeting last week when I gave at talk in Monterey, notes also that:

Please note that these numbers may not be accurate, especially, the radius. In this document, it is using a Japanese old measure which we are not using now “ri”. In this document it said 2-ri, and if we convert it to meter, it should be approximately 8000 meter. (1-ri is about 4000 meter. But usually, when you describe the Hiroshima bomb effect, usually, is is said that the atomic bomb destroyed almost every building in 2 km radius. But I guess this point is not so crucial here.

Masako also gave me a good idea for a particularly chilling feature to add to NUKEMAP in the near future — a listing of how many hospitals, schools, and other grim facilities your “detonation” has destroyed, as a way of emphasizing the humanitarian impact of the bomb. Watch for it in the forthcoming update in the next few months…

Masako also noted that on the leaflet above, none of the atomic targets (Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kokura, Niigata) are featured. That doesn’t mean they didn’t receive leaflets, but it’s an interesting bit. I wonder if there is any hard evidence that these cities received LeMay leaflets? Given that LeMay had agreed to take them off of their target list, one wonders if that inadvertently meant they got less warning than any other major cities. But I really don’t know. The only source I’d really trust on this would be some sort of document from the time which listed the various propaganda drop runs, and I have not sought such a thing out, if it exists.

One of the interesting ones to pop up again and again is the question of whether the United States warned Hiroshima and Nagasaki about their impending destruction. It’s a discussion in this case that has actually been confused by the abundance of context-less primary sources on the Internet. In particular, the Truman Library posted (some time back) copies of leaflets that it has labeled as being dropped on August 6, 1945 — the day of the Hiroshima bombing. These leaflets have proliferated across the web onto other reputable sites, like PBS’s Truman resources. The understandable result is that a lot of amateur historians out there have concluded that indeed, we did warn the Japanese.

But the truth, as with many things, is more complicated. I want to talk about three potential “warnings,” here, as both a means to help clarify this issue (to any other future Googlers about this topic), and also to use it as a case study for why history is more than just finding documents.

The first potential “warning” is the Potsdam Declaration. It was issued on July 26, 1945, by Truman, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek. It ends with this particular bit:

“We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.”

Was the “prompt and utter destruction” meant to imply atomic bombing? It’s not clear. An earlier draft of the statement, written by Secretary of War Stimson and his staff well before the results of the Trinity test were known, doesn’t include the “prompt and utter destruction” phrase. It does, however, emphasize that the point of the Potsdam Declaration is to try and shake Japan into surrendering, and that part of how it should do so is to outline “The varied and overwhelming character of the force we are about to bring to bear on the islands,” and “The inevitability and completeness of the destruction which the full application of this force will entail.” Varied and overwhelming sound like Stimson was thinking about more than just atomic bombs — he’s thinking about further firebombing, he’s thinking about invasion.

In any case, a veiled warning is not much of a warning. I’m not saying that the Potsdam Declaration should have warned specifically about atomic bombs — whether that would have done anything positive is unclear to me — but I think under any reasonable interpretation, it isn’t possible except in retrospect to even imply that it was some kind of warning about atomic bombs.

The second potential “warning”: the so-called LeMay leaflets. These were leaflets that were dropped on dozens of Japanese cities in July 1945. There were many versions of the leaflets dropped. Some listed specific cities, some did not. The most famous one, shown above, depicts a squadron of B-29s laying waste to a city with firebombs. The text apparently (I don’t read Japanese) said the following:

Read this carefully as it may save your life or the life of a relative or a friend. In the next few days, four or more of the cities named on the reverse side of this leaflet will be destroyed by American bombs. These cities contain military installations and workshops or factories, which produce military goods. We are determined to destroy all of the tools of the military clique that they are using to prolong this useless war. Unfortunately, bombs have no eyes. So, in accordance with America’s well-known humanitarian policies, the American Air Force, which does not wish to injure innocent people, now gives you warning to evacuate the cities named and save your lives.

America is not fighting the Japanese people but is fighting the military clique, which has enslaved the Japanese people. The peace, which America will bring, will free the people from the oppression of the Japanese military clique and mean the emergence of a new and better Japan.

You can restore peace by demanding new and better leaders who will end the War.

We cannot promise that only these cities will be among those attacked, but at least four will be, so heed this warning and evacuate these cities immediately.

Which cities were warned? I’ve seen sources that basically say, following an article in the CIA’s Studies in Intelligence, that they were “delivered to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and 33 other Japanese cities on 1 August 1945.” Curiously, this phrase has been removed in their main web version of the document. I’d love to see the actual list of cities that they were delivered to, if someone has it, or can translate it. Specifically, I’m curious if all four of the final atomic bomb targets (Hiroshima, Kokura, Nagasaki, and Nigata) were on the list or not, since the US Army Air Forces had agreed to “preserve” those targets from firebombing. (I’d also be interested in knowing if Kyoto was named or not.)

These leaflets certainly warned of bombing and destruction. They were not warnings about atomic bombs, though, but firebombs. Does the distinction matter? I’ll come to that at the end. They are, if anything, the closest thing to any kind of “real warning” that was given to Japanese civilians.

Lastly, we have those mysterious warnings from the Truman website, the ones which were very specific about atomic bombs. There are reasons on the face of it to be suspicious that it is what the Truman Library claims it is.

The first one is dated by the library to August 6th, 1945. The fact that it references the past destruction of Hiroshima makes it, of course, pretty clear that it wasn’t dropped on Hiroshima ahead of time, and throws the dating into question — even if it was drawn up on August 6th, it’s too late to be used on Hiroshima. A second one, also labeled as August 6, 1945, references the Soviet invasion of Manchuria… which took place on August 9th. So, just a priori, we can’t really give the library’s own dating labels any credence — they’re clearly wrong about the dates, and the dates matter in this case, since we are talking about whether the warnings happened before the bombs were actually used. And that’s not even getting into the whole “the atomic bomb was a secret” bit.

What’s going on here? There’s only so much we can learn from these two isolated documents alone. For more… we head into the archives!

Click image to view full document.

In late May 1946, Lt. Colonel J.F. Moynahan wrote a memo to General Groves with the subject heading “History Psychological Warfare, Manhattan Project.”² It appears Groves wanted it for his internal “Manhattan District History” he was compiling (more on that another time).  I’ve included the entire memo above, so you can read it at your leisure, but here’s the main timeline that Moynahan lays out.

On August 7th, 1945 — the day after Hiroshima — General Henry “Hap” Arnold ordered that propaganda leaflets be prepared regarding the atomic bomb. General Thomas Farrell, Groves’ representative in the Pacific, was charged with carrying it out. This is interesting, no? It was the Army that made the call, not the Manhattan Project people.

The Army Air Forces were instructed to lend their assistance. Farrell received the cable as he was boarding a C-54 plane (along with, among others, Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets) to visit Admiral Nimitz to report on the Hiroshima mission. Farrell set the ball in motion by getting in touch with the propaganda people already in the Pacific, and work began on planning the leaflet missions on Saipan. It was determined that they should use “half-sized” leaflets, and that they should try to distribute 6 million of them. They also made an inventory of the “leaflet bombs” that they were dropped out of the planes in (you don’t just drop them out of the hatch). They decided, in terms of targeting, to try and get a 60% saturation of all 47 enemy cities that had a population of over 100,000.

Then they had to figure out the text of it. Drafts were drawn up. Work was hurried. They worked straight through the night of August 7th. The Manhattan Project personnel on Tinian were intensely interested, as you’d expect, to the degree that they were “at times a positive obstruction” to finishing the drafts.

A copy of the final “atomic bomb” leaflet, I think? I don’t read Japanese, but this was attached to the above memo. If you do read Japanese, I’d love a translation. Please ignore my thumb in the corner — it’s hard to photograph documents that are bound like these ones were.

Finally, on the morning of August 8th, the plan was presented to Farrell at Tinian. Farrell edited the message a bit and approved it. The message was then flown to Guam, where the Army Air Forces and the Navy signed off on it. Radio Saipan was told to broadcast the message every 15 minutes, though Moynahan had no information as to when that actually began. The translation of the text was done, fascinatingly enough, by three Japanese officers held as prisoners on Guam. After talking with the officers, the Americans also decided to make the format look like that of a Japanese newspaper.

What they still lacked were the leaflet bombs — they had run low. A midnight flight from Sapian to Guam supplied those. And then Russia entered the war. So it was decided that they should incorporate that into the message. So that slowed things up again. Finally, they got it ready to go… but they weren’t in any way coordinated with the actual bombing plans. So Nagasaki did get warning leaflets… the day after it was atomic bombed.

Well, that’s a grim clarification. The short version: leaflets specifically warning about atomic bombs were created… but they weren’t dropped on either Hiroshima or Nagasaki before they were atomic bombed. The first Truman Library document was the first draft, that was never dropped. The second one was the second draft, and was dropped, but only after the bombs were used.

So what do we take away from all of this? The first is the historian’s point: isolated, context-free documents do not interpret themselves. Part the hard job of an historian is to provide the context for a given historical artifact. In this case, we’re talking about leaflet drafts, and the context is when they created, why they were created, and specifically when they were used. It doesn’t help, of course, that the library themselves have put incorrect dates on them, but even with a correct date, the context is still not completely straightforward. Context is everything — without it, nothing makes sense, and you can come away with exactly the opposite conclusion from the truth of things.

The second question is about the warnings themselves. I don’t think the Potsdam statement counts as a real warning — it’s an ultimatum, and it’s a vague one. I don’t think the atomic bombing leaflets count as real warnings, either — they were dropped after the fact.

A map created by the US Army Air Forces in the immediate postwar showing their strategic bombing handiwork. Includes percentages of cities destroyed, as well as similar-sized American analogs. Cleaned up by me from the original.

But the LeMay leaflets are the more complicated case. They are ostensibly warnings of immediate destruction — and the cities they “warned” were indeed destroyed, famously so. Whether they warned of destruction by firebombing or atomic bombing strikes me as somewhat of a distinction without a difference. Either way, it’s destruction of entire cities.

But do the leaflets in any way reduce culpability, for either the firebombs or the atomic bombs? This is the more difficult moral question. The leaflets were written as if they were dropped because the American Air Force actually cared about civilian lives:

Unfortunately, bombs have no eyes. So, in accordance with America’s well-known humanitarian policies, the American Air Force, which does not wish to injure innocent people, now gives you warning to evacuate the cities named and save your lives.

This strikes me as pure falsehood. The entire goal of the strategic bombing was to destroy civilian cities, with the idea of breaking the Japanese ability to make any kind of war, and with breaking the Japanese spirit. The firebombing raids had been optimized for the maximum destruction of entire cities, not just the parts involved with actual warmaking or even periphery industries. The “shock” effect of the atomic bombs was in part predicated on them taking high numbers of lives — they were meant to be so horrible as to be unendurable. The idea that firebombing was somehow, in any fashion, meant to be compatible with “humanitarian policies” is complete nonsense.

The leaflets were not part of any humanitarian mission. They were part of a campaign of “Psychological Warfare,” as was very explicit within their organization in the military. The goal was to convince the Japanese people to rebel, or to abandon their posts, or to hide, or to pressure their leaders into surrender. Now, whether that is ultimately, in a means-to-an-end way, “humanitarian” or not, one can debate. But you have to get pretty far along that twisty road to think that burning civilians alive is “humanitarian.”

Here’s a thought experiment: If a terrorist sent a warning before nuking an American city, would that get them off the hook for the bombing? (Much less if they named three possible cities, and then only bombed one of them.) If Hitler had issued an ultimatum to Great Britain that surrender was the only option, would he be let off the hook for the Blitz? Does it matter that the “warnings” in question were issued to a very non-free Japanese populace?

Ultimately what I’m asking is, do warnings really matter? I don’t think there’s an easy, pat answer here. There are a lot of interlocked ethical questions about ends-versus-means, the obligation of an attacking power, the obligation of a citizen in a country during war, and so on. Personally, though, I do think it’s somewhat of a red herring: the real issue still, for me, is under what circumstances one accepts the morality of total war. Because if you haven’t hashed that out, then quibbling about which warning was specific enough, whether that somehow reduced moral culpability, is all just an issue of counting angels on the head of a pin.

1. I used to do this with Google Alerts, but their service has been fickle as of late, so I’ve also signed up with Talkwalker.
2. Citation: Lt. Col. J.F. Moynahan to General Leslie R. Groves, “History Psychological Warfare, Manhattan Project,” (23 May 1946), National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD, RG 77, Box 49, “314.7 – History (MED).”

From Hans Bethe’s “Memorandum on the History of the Thermonuclear Program” (1952), which features some really provocative DELETED stamps. A minimally-redacted version assembled from many differently redacted copies by Chuck Hansen is available here.

From a security perspective, it’s actually rather generous. The redactor is often giving us the context of the secret, the length of the material kept from us (a word? a sentence? a paragraph? a page?), and helpfully drawing our eye to the parts of the document that still contain juicy bits. The Onion’s spoof from a few years back, “CIA Realizes It’s Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years,” is only slightly off from the real truth. Blacking something out is only a step away from highlighting its importance, and the void makes us curious. In fact, learning what was actually in there can be quite anticlimactic, just as learning how a magician does their trick (“the guy in the audience is in on the trick”).

And, of course, the way the US declassification system is set up virtually guarantees that multiple, differently-redacted copies of documents will eventually exist. Carbon copies of the same documents exist in multiple agencies, and each agency can be separately petitioned for copies of their files, and they will send them to individual reviewers, and they will each review their guides and try and interpret them. There’s very little centralization, and lots of individual discretion in interpreting the guides.

The National Security Archive recently posted an Electronic Briefing Book that was very critical of this approach. In their case, they pointed out that a given paragraph in a once-secret document that was deemed by the redactor to be completely safe in 2001 was in 2003 deemed secret again, and then, in 2007, reaffirmed safe, and then, in 2012, again secret. “There often seems little logic to redaction decisions, which depend on the whim of the individual reviewer, with no appreciation of either the passage of time or the interests of history and accountability,” writes Michael Dobbs.

This sort of thing happens all the time, of course. In the National Security Archive’s Chuck Hansen papers there are bundles of little stapled “books” he would create of multiply, differently-redacted copies of the same document. They are a fun thing to browse through, viewing four different versions of the same page, each somewhat differently hacked up.

A page from a 1951 meeting transcript of the General Advisory Committee, from the Hansen files. Animated to show how he staples three different copies together. Some documents contain five or more separate versions of each page. For closer inspections of the page, click here.

In the case of Hansen’s papers, these differences came about because he was filing Freedom of Information Act requests (or looking at the results of other’s requests) over extended periods of time to different agencies. The passage of time is important, because guides change in the meantime (usually towards making things less secret; “reclassification” is tricky). And the multiple sites means you are getting completely different redactors looking at it, often with different priorities or expertise.

Two different redactors, working with the exact same guides, can come up with very different interpretations. This is arguably inherent to any kind of classifying system, not just one for security classifications. (Taxonomy is a vicious profession.) The guides that I have seen (all historical ones, of course) are basically lists of statements and classifications. Sometimes the statements are very precise and technical, referencing specific facts or numbers. Sometimes they are incredibly broad, referencing entire fields of study. And they can vary quite a bit — sometimes they are specific technical facts, sometimes they are broad programmatic facts, sometimes they are just information about meetings that have been held. There aren’t any items that, from a distance, resemble flies, but it’s not too far off from Borges’ mythical encyclopedia.

The statements try to be clear, but if you imagine applying them to a real-life document, you can see where lots of individual discretion would come into the picture. Is fact X implied by sentence Y? Is it derivable, if paired with sentence Z? And so on. And there’s a deeper problem, too: if two redactors identify the same fact as being classified, how much of the surrounding context do they also snip out with it? Even a stray preposition can give away information, like whether the classified word is singular or plural. What starts as an apparently straightforward exercise in cutting out secrets quickly becomes a strange deconstructionist enterprise.

One of my favorite examples of differently redacted documents came to me through two Freedom of Information Act requests to the same agency at about the same time. Basically, two different people (I presume) at the Department of Energy looked at this document from 1970, and this was the result:

In one, the top excerpt is deemed declassified and the bottom classified. In the other, the reverse. Put them together, and you have it all.  (While I’m at it, I’ll also just add that a lot of classified technical data looks more or less like the above: completely opaque if you aren’t a specialist. That doesn’t mean it isn’t important to somebody, of course. It is one of the reasons I am resistant to any calls for “common sense” classification, because I think we are well beyond the “common” here.) In this case, the irony is double, because what they’re de/classifying are excerpts from classification guides… very meta, no?¹

What’s going on here? Did the redactors really interpret their guidelines in exactly the opposite ways? Or are both of these borderline cases where discretion was required? Or was it just an accident? Any of these could be plausible explanations, though I suspect they are each borderline cases and their juxtaposition is just a coincidence. I don’t actually see this as a symptom of dysfunction, though. I see it as a natural result of the kind of declassification system we have. It’s the function, not the dysfunction — it’s just that the function is set up to have these kinds of results.

The idea that you can slot all knowledge into neat little categories that perfectly overlap with our security concerns is already a problematic one, as Peter Galison has argued. Galison’s argument is that security classification systems assume that knowledge is “atomic,” which is to say, comes in discrete bundles that can be disconnected from other knowledge (read “atomic” like “atomic theory” and not “atomic bomb”). The study of knowledge (either from first principles or historically) shows exactly the opposite — knowledge is constituted by sending out lots of little tendrils to other bits of knowledge, and knowledge of the natural world is necessarily interconnected. If you know a little bit about one thing you often know a little bit about everything similar to it.

For this archive copy of a 1947 meeting of the General Advisory Committee, all of the raw numbers were cut out with X-Acto knives. Somewhere, one hopes, is an un-mutilated version. In some cases, numbers like these were initially omitted in drawing up the original documents, and a separate sheet of numbers would be kept in a safe, to be produced only when necessary.

This is a good philosophical point, one that arguably is a lot stronger for scientific facts than many others (the number of initiators, for example, is a lot less easily connected to other facts than is, say, the chemistry of plutonium), but I would just add that layered on top of this is the practical problem of trying to get multiple human beings to agree on the implementations of these classifications. That is, the classification are already problematic, and now you’re trying to get people to interpret them uniformly? Impossible… unless you opt for maximum conservatism and a minimum of discretion. Which isn’t what anybody is calling for.

In theory, you can read the classification history of a document from all of its messy stamps and scribblings. They aren’t just for show; they tell you what it’s been through, and how to regard it now.

Declassification can be arbitrary, or at least appear arbitrary to those of us locked outside of the process. (It is one of the symptoms of secrecy that the logic of the redactor is itself usually secret.) But to me, the real sin of our current system is the lack of resources put towards it, which makes the whole thing run slow and leads to huge backlogs. When the system is running at a swift pace, you can at least know what it is they’re holding back from you, compare it to other sources, file appeals, draw attention to it, and so on. When it takes years to start processing requests (as is the case with the National Archives, in my experience; it varies a lot by agency), much less actually declassify them, there is a real impediment to research and public knowledge. I’d rather declassification be arbitrary and fast than conservative and slow.

That individual redactors individually interpreting the guidelines according to the standards they are told to use come up with different results doesn’t bother me as much. There is going to be a certain amount of error in any large system, especially one that deals with borderline cases and allows individual discretion. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but it’s being able to play the game in the first place that matters the most to me.

1. The document is a discussion of instances in which classification guidelines are based on strict numerical limits, as opposed to general concepts. Citation is: Murray L. Nash to Theos Thomson (3 November 1970), “AEC Classification Guidance Based on Numerical Limits,” part of SECY-625, Department of Energy Archives, RG 326, Collection 6 Secretariat, Box 7832, Folder 6, “O&M 7 Laser Classification Panel. The top was received as the response to a FOIA request I made in 2008, the bottom another one in 2010. Both were part of FOIA requests relating to declassification decisions relating to inertial confinement fusion; the memo in question was part of information given to a panel of scientists regarding creating new fusion classification guidelines.

Visualizing nuclear war is an old media pastime. How old? One of the most vivid early depictions of this sort of atomic apocalyptic thinking come from Life magazine’s issue of November 19, 1945 — only a few months after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

From the cover of the issue, you’d have little to suspect about its contents. “Ah, big belts! Fascinating! I love big belts!”

But once you get beyond that, the interior stories are much more interesting. For people interested in World War II and the Cold War, there are a lot of great stories in here: articles about what should be done with postwar China, what was going on in postwar Poland (with some impressive, awful photographs), plus an article on occupied Tokyo (with some amazing illustrations), and another on the OSS (spies!). There was even, at the very end, a reproduction of the Jack Aeby photo of the “Trinity” test, in full color (which was apparently just “orange,” after going through Life’s printing processes).

But the real stunner story of the issue was something much more grim. Once you get past a lot of fluffy stuff, you’re greeted with this horror:

“The 36-Hour War.” This long, feature story is a description of what nuclear war in the future will look like. It was based on a report by General “Hap” Arnold, the chief of the Army Air Forces during World War II and the later founder of Project RAND, which became the RAND Corporation, the epitome of a Cold War think tank. (He was also, incidentally, the guy who gave Curtis LeMay his job in the Pacific theatre.)

The report in question was the “Third Report of the Commanding General of the Army Air Forces to the Secretary of War.” Hunting around a bit, I eventually located a copy of the original online, if you’d like to look at it. It was published only a week before the Life story on it, which is pretty impressive given the illustrations involved in the article. The report is concerned both with summarizing what had happened in the air war during World War II on both the European and Pacific fronts, as well as a concluding section on “Air Power and the Future,” which is the subject of the “36-Hour War” article. Like many strategic bombing advocates, Arnold downplayed the importance of the bomb for World War II, emphasizing that the only reason the atomic bombs, or any bombs, could be delivered at will was because they had already won strategic superiority over the island. It’s the future where Arnold thought atomic weapons will really matter.

And it’s a grim future: rockets plus nuclear weapons equals “the ghastliest of all wars,” according to Life. The implications of ICBMs somewhat understood well over a decade before they were technologically realized.

The Life story starts with a large illustration of Washington, DC, getting nuked (hey, at least it’s not New York again, right? But why are they nuking RFK Stadium?), and then follows with a two-page spread showing 13 “key U.S. centers” getting wiped out by the Soviet Union. “Within a few seconds atomic bombs have exploded over New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boulder Dam, New Orleans, Denver, Washington, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Kansas City, and Knoxville.” (Sorry, Boston, but you didn’t rate! Austin, you are fine for now!) They guess that 10 million people would be killed in the initial attack. “The enemy’s purpose is not to destroy industry, which is an objective only in the long old-fashioned wars like the last one, but to paralyze the U.S. by destroying its people.”

Amusingly, the Life writer suggests that these Soviet missiles came from silos in equatorial Africa, “secretly built in the jungle to escape detection by the UNO Security Council.” Ah, the naiveté of 1945, believing that it would be a taboo of some sort to build ICBM sites! Believing that some kind of international order would be assembled that might affect the conduct of nuclear war! Sigh.

But on the whole the Life story is not bad (except for the ending, which I’ll get to). On the page above, it talks about radar as an early warning technique which they claim would give perhaps 30 minutes warning in the event of an ICBM attack. But they also point out that radar can be evaded by low-altitude missiles and smuggled atomic bobs. And they recognize that 30 minutes is really not that long of a period in time — “even 30 minutes is too little time for men to control the weapons of atomic war.” At best, they suggest, such warning could be used to fire defensive rockets at the incoming rockets, a topic they cover on the next page.

“Our Defensive Machines Stop Few Attackers.” Dang. In this hypothetical future, the US has a missile defense system that works pretty much like you’d expect one to work today — maybe it might destroy a few of them, “but inevitably it would miss some of the time.” The illustration above shows the enemy rocket “coasting through space” in its final descent, with the interceptor missile coming up from the ground. Some nice copy: “When the two collide, the atomic explosion will appear to observers on the earth as a brilliant new star.” It doesn’t actually work that way, but whatever, it’s a nice sentence.

In his report, Arnold outlines three approaches to “defense” against atomic attack. First, you basically try to make sure nobody is making nuclear weapons. Not a bad start, you have to admit. Second, you should try and develop defenses against launched attacks — e.g. missile and bomber defense. A bit more problematic. Third, you redesign the entire country to make it harder to attack with nukes. This is basically the “dispersal” theory of defense — if you don’t have all of your infrastructure and people living in a few, centralized locations, then the vulnerability to all but the most apocalyptic attacks is a lot lower.

But finally, he emphasizes — in the manner befitting a general, I suppose — that the best defense is a good offense. That is, deterrence. And to do that, you need a good second-strike capability, to use the lingo of a later time.

The Life writer and illustrator decided to combine both of these last two ideas, creating a rather amazing fantasy nuclear installation. Take a look at that spread — it’s a huge underground city devoted to producing ICBMs and launching them en masse. It has underground streets and underground cars and underground trains. I’m not sure that Arnold was suggesting anything like this, but it’s pretty amazing. It doesn’t seem very practical, for a lot of reasons (those firing tubes look pretty vulnerable to attack, which would moot the whole installation), but it’s wonderfully imaginative for 1945. Philip K. Dick wrote about crazy installations like this in some of his short stories, but those were written in the 1950s and 1960s.

Towards the “war’s end,” enemy troops would show up. This is because, according to the Life writers, “in spite of the apocalyptic destruction caused by its atomic bombs, an enemy nation would have to invade the U.S. to win the war.” Win the war? Here you see a little bit of divergence from what would be a more common narrative: that nuclear war is really just about a “knock-out punch,” as opposed to conventional notions of taking over a country.

The illustration above is pretty interesting. OK, obvious cheesecake fantasy going on there, as gas-masked Soviet thugs step over the somehow-still-beautiful corpse of a telephone operator whose blouse has almost been knocked open by atomic bombs. The Soviet soldiers are attempting to repair the telephone infrastructure and get the country back up to (occupied) speed, and are walking around destroyed streets with bazookas (a less-sung wonder-weapon of WWII). The Life staff estimate that 40 million would be dead at this point “and all cities of more than 50,000 population have been leveled.” New York’s Fifth Avenue is merely a “lane through the debris.” 

But, but! Have some hope! Improbably, “as it is destroyed, the U.S. is fighting back. The enemy airborne troops are wiped out. U.S. rockets lay waste the enemy’s cities. U.S. airborne troops successfully occupy his country. The U.S. wins the atomic war.“ Wait, what? We won the war? How? A little hand-waving was all that was needed. I know, they nuked all our major cities and landed troops with bazookas, but don’t worry, we managed to (within 36-hours, mind you!) launch a devastating counterattack that included occupying his country. Well. I am relieved and can move on to the article on big belts, no?

Well, hooray. Of course, the country has been reduced to radioactive rubble — “By the marble lions of the New York Public Library, U.S. technicians test the rubble of the shattered city for radioactivity.” But chin up — we won the war!

It’s an amazing place for the article to just… end. A preview of un-defendable, horrible destruction, and then a quick deus ex machina that resolves it. And what a resolution! 40 million dead, no more big cities, but don’t worry, we got ‘em back! It’s really not very satisfying. It has the whiff of a heavy, least-minute editorial hand: “we can’t end on such a grim note, and then expect them to just move on to other articles. We’ve gotta win, in the end! Give ‘em some hope!”

One wonders: what was the public supposed to take away from this? Support for international control of the bomb? Support for better defenses? Fear of the future? It’s really a wonderful mess, the sort of thing you’d expect only a few months after the bomb made its debut, to be sure. Not all of the clichés had codified, the genre was still new.

Speaking of which — remember that devastating sequence from Fog of War, where Robert McNamara describes the firebombing of Japan, telling you what percentage of each Japanese city was destroyed, and then telling you an American-sized equivalent? The Arnold report in question did it first, and may have been the source for the data (the percentages and cities seem to match exactly):

Which makes a wonderful full-circle, doesn’t it? Something originally used to brag about performance has now become a touchstone for explaining the barbarity of the Pacific campaign.

It’s easy to get sucked into the mystique of secrecy. One way I’ve found that is useful to help people think critically about secrecy (including myself) is to focus on the narratives of secrecy. That is, instead of talking about secrecy itself, look instead at how people talk about secrecy, how they frame it, how it plays a role in stories they tell about the Manhattan Project.

One of many early articles in the genre of Manhattan Project secrecy: “How We Kept the Atomic Bomb Secret,” from the Saturday Evening Post, November 1945.

My first example of this is the most obvious one, because it is the official one. We might call this one the narrative of the “best-kept secret,” because this is how the Army originally advertised it. Basically, the “best-kept secret” narrative is about how the Manhattan Project was sooo super-secret, that nobody found out about it, despite its ridiculous size and expense. The Army emphasized this very early on, and, in fact, Groves got into some trouble because there were so many stories about how great their secrecy was, revealing too much about the “sources and methods” of counterintelligence work.

The truth is, even without the knowledge of the spying (which they didn’t have in 1945), this narrative is somewhat false even on its own terms. There were leaks about the Manhattan Project (and atomic bombs and energy in general) printed in major press outlets in the United States and abroad. It was considered an “open secret” among Washington politicos and journalists that the Army was working on a new super-weapon that involved atomic energy just prior to its use. Now, it certainly could have been worse, but it’s not clear whether the Army (or the Office of Censorship) had much control over that.

Panel from FEYNMAN by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick.

We might contrast that with the sort of narrative of secrecy that comes up with regards to many participants’ tales of being at places like Los Alamos. Richard Feynman’s narrative of secrecy is one of absurd secrecy — of ridiculous adherence to stupid rules. In Feynman’s narratives, secrecy is a form of idiotic bureaucracy, imposed by rigid, lesser minds. It’s the sort of thing that a trickster spirit like Feynman can’t resist teasing, whether he’s cracking safes, teasing guards about holes in the fence, or finding elaborate ways to irritate the local censor in his correspondence with his wife. All participants’ narratives are not necessarily absurd, but they are almost always about the totalitarian nature of secrecy. I don’t mean “fascist/communist” here — I mean the original sense of the word, which is to say, the Manhattan Project secrecy regime was one that infused every aspect of human life for those who lived under it. It was not simply a workplace procedure, because there was no real division between work and life at the Manhattan Project sites. (Even recreational sports were considered an essential part of the Oak Ridge secrecy regime, for example.)

So we might isolate two separate narratives here — “secrecy is ridiculous” and “secrecy is totalitarian” — with an understanding that no single narrative is necessarily exclusive of being combined with others.¹

“Beyond loyalty, the harsh requirements of security”: Time magazine’s stark coverage of the 1954 security hearing of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

But the Feynman approach looks perhaps unreasonably jolly when we contrast it to the narrative of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his students, for whom secrecy became something more sinister: an excuse to blacklist, a means of punishment. Oppenheimer did fine during the Manhattan Project, but the legacy of secrecy caught up with him in his 1954 security hearing, which effectively ended his government career. For his students and friends, the outcomes were often as bad if not worse. His brother, Frank, for example, found himself essentially blacklisted from all research, even from the opportunity to leave the country and start over. (It had a happy ending, of course, because without being blacklisted, he might never have founded the Exploratorium, but let’s just ignore that for a moment.)

For a lot of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, secrecy ended up putting their careers on the line, sometimes even their lives on the line. In response to (fairly ungrounded) suspicions about Oppenheimer’s student Rossi Lomanitz, for example, Groves actually removed his draft deferment and had him sent into the dangerous Pacific Theatre. This narrative of secrecy is what we might classically call the “tragic” narrative of secrecy — it involves a fall from grace. It emphasizes the rather sinister undertones and consequences of secrecy regimes, especially during the period of McCarthyism.

The original “best-kept secret” story, released on August 9, 1945 (the day of the Nagasaki bombing).

So what other narratives are there? Here is a short list, in no particular order, that I compiled for a talk I gave at a workshop some weeks ago. I don’t claim it to be exhaustive, or definitive. Arguably some of these are somewhat redundant, as well. But I found compiling it a useful way for me to think myself around these narratives, and how many there were:

• “Secrecy is essential”: early accounts, “best-kept secret” stories
• “Secrecy is totalitarian”: secret site participants’ accounts
• “Secrecy is absurd”: e.g. Feynman’s safes and fences
  • Common hybrid: “Secrecy is absurdly totalitarian”
• “Secrecy is counterproductive”: arguments by Leo Szilard et al., that secrecy slowed them down (related to the “absurd” narrative)
• “Secrecy is ineffective”: the post-Fuchs understanding — there were lots of spies
• “Secrecy is undemocratic”: secrecy reduces democratic participation in important decisions, like the decision to use the bomb; fairly important to revisionist accounts
• “Secrecy is tragic”: ruinous effects of McCarthyism and spy fears on the lives of many scientists
• “Secrecy is corrupt”: late/post-Cold War, environmental and health concerns

It’s notable that almost all of these are negative narratives. I don’t think that’s just bias on my part — positive stories about secrecy fit into only a handful of genres, whereas there are so many different ways that secrecy is talked about as negative. Something to dwell on.

What does talking about these sorts of things get us? Being aware that there are multiple “stock” narratives helps us be more conscious about the narratives we talk about and tap into. You can’t really get out of talking through narratives if you have an interest in being readable, but you can be conscious about your deployment of them. For me, making sense of secrecy in an intellectual, analytical fashion requires being able to see when people are invoking one narrative or another. And it keeps us from falling into traps. The “absurd” narrative is fun, for example, but characterizing the Manhattan Project experience of secrecy makes too much light of the real consequences of it.

As an historian, what I’m really trying to do here is develop a new narrative of secrecy — that of the meta-narrative, One Narrative to Rule Them All, the narrative that tells the story of how the other narratives came about (a history of narratives, if you will). Part of talking about secrecy historically is looking at how narratives are created, how they are made plausible, how they circulate, and where they come from. Because these things don’t just appear out of “nowhere”: for each of these narratives, there is deep history, and often a specific, singular origin instance. (For some, it is pretty clear: Klaus Fuchs really makes the “ineffective” narrative spring to live; Leo Szilard and the Scientists’ Movement push very hard for the “counterproductive” narrative in late 1945; the “best-kept secret” approach was a deliberate public relations push by the government.)

As a citizen more broadly, though, being conscious about narratives is important for parsing out present day issues as well. How may of these narratives have been invoked by all sides in the discussions of WikiLeaks, for example? How do these narratives shape public perceptions of issues revolving around secrecy, and public trust? Realizing that there are distinct narratives of secrecy is only the first step.

1. Both of these might classically be considered “comic” narratives of secrecy, under a strict narratological definition. But I’m not really a huge fan of strict narratological definitions in this context — they are too broad.

Most of the photos we are familiar with of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are black and white. The effect is one of a dusty, barren landscape — they look like abandoned cities on the moon. On top of that, almost all photos of the cities from the ground were taken after the bodies had been cleaned up and the streets cleared — most were taken no earlier than late September 1945, and many of the “classic” ones are actually from mid-to-late 1946, a year or so later. The net effect is that the cities were somehow neatly “vaporized.” This is a false impression.

Color photographs of the city, however, are far more striking. What was a city of dust now looks like a city of rubble. It becomes, in some unconscious way, more believable, more recent, less distant. It becomes more “real.”¹

The effects of the bomb also become a bit more clear, though there is still a lot missing. The atomic bombs used during World War II killed most of its victims by burning and crushing them — the classic medieval tortures, made wholesale by technology but not much more modern. (Only about 15-20% of the people at the cities died truly “modern” deaths, from the radiation effects.)

The above photograph is of Hiroshima, apparently taken in March 1946 — some eight months after the bombing. You can tell a lot has been cleaned up: the roads, for example, are very clear. There are no obvious corpses. A few reinforced buildings are standing, but not much else is. There are some telephone or electricity poles up; I don’t know whether those were added after the attack, or were somehow still standing despite it (blast effects can be complicated).

The photo above is labeled as being of Hiroshima in the autumn of 1945. Superficially, when compared to the one before it, one thinks that the damage looks a lot lighter. There are a lot of poles and trees and a few shack-like structures in the foreground, and some factory-looking buildings in the background. But there’s still a lot of rubble — a lot of places that just aren’t there anymore. (I’m a little suspicious about whether this photo is identified correctly, to be honest.)

The above photograph was taken by the photographer J.R. Eyerman sometime in the fall of 1945. It’s a rare color view from the ground, as opposed to being from aircraft or from a high vantage point. It’s a vivid look at the twisted jungle of pipes, bricks, concrete, wood, trees, and other unidentified objects. Imagine the struggle of trying to make your way through that.

Another of Hiroshima from March 1946. Compare it to the one above, and how different a perception one has. It’s not that one of these is wrong, per se; they’re both of Hiroshima, and they both give away a different sense of the damage. In trying to get a sense of scale for these things, I find mixing up the modes of perception to be pretty important. One needs to understand what this looks like at the ground level, but then one needs to realize the extent to which that damage applied.

The above two are both of Nagasaki from around October 1945. Again, notice the almost capricious nature of this kind of damage: some of those trees look not so badly off, next to structures that have collapsed to the point of non-identification. The presence of people also lets you get a sense of the scale from the human point of view. A big ruinous mess.

This is listed as the damage outside a school in Nagasaki, taken just a few weeks after the bombs were dropped. Without knowing what this looked like before the attack, it’s hard to get a sense for what we’re looking at, but it appears the windows of the school are probably all blown in (there isn’t any glare or reflection), and those are some pretty big trees to see snapped about.

Hiroshima’s financial district, date unknown. Again, note the apparent capriciousness of the damage. The truth is, the construction of the buildings in question matters quite a bit. But don’t be too fooled — being inside a burning concrete building whose windows are blown in isn’t that great. You can tell the one in the middle has no remaining glass and some ominous-looking charring around the windows.

And here is one of the Hiroshima Gas Company and the Honkawa Elementary School. I think the latter really emphasizes the horror of “strategic” bombing, where burning elementary schools become acceptable as “collateral damage.” The famous dome at the upper right hand corner of the photo was directly underneath the explosion; the school was about 800 feet from there.

There are two ways you can go wrong in making sense of the scale of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The first is to see the bombs as instant vaporizers, to see the bombs as Everything Killers that just zap cities out of existence. This isn’t the case. They kill by crushing and burning and irradiating. They don’t turn you to dust.  They don’t freeze you and turn you into a stop-motion skeleton, like in The Day After. For some, death was instantaneous, but for a lot of others, it was a much more protracted affair.

The other way to misunderstand it is to downplay it. Ah, a number of large buildings survived! It’s not so bad, then, right? Maybe the whole nuke thing has been exaggerated! Well, unless you are, you know, not in one of those buildings, and even if you are, it’s a pretty awful thing. Yes, you can approximate the city-wide effects of early atomic bombs with a fleet of conventional bombers dropping napalm — which personally I consider just as much a weapon of mass destruction as anything else, and yes, napalming cities is “conventional” in the sense that it is not a nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon, but let’s not forget that it’s not exactly an everyday occurrence. But being napalmed is not exactly a walk in the park for those being bombed, either.

So what’s the right view? An ugly, troublesome, disturbing one; right between those extremes. The atomic bomb was a weapon used to inflict tremendous human suffering. (This is true whether you think its use was justified or not.) If an atomic bomb were to go off over your city, the damage would be horrifying, the death toll staggering. But it’s a level of destruction that people should try to appreciate for what it is — a realistic possibility, not a clean science-fiction ending or a blow to be shrugged off. 

That’s the perception I’m always searching for. The color photographs add a little bit to that, to keep one from the misconceptions, to keep one from seeing these wrecked cities as sanitary piles of dust.

1. These come from here and there on the Internet, but two very nice galleries I got a number of them from are here, here, and here. I’ve done some color correction on the photos, which understandably have faded a bit over time.

Manhattan Project inventions: Patents 2,708,656, 2,709,222, 3,956,658, and 3,358,605.

During the Manhattan Project, one of the odder activities that was undertaken — approved directly by Roosevelt and Churchill — was to try and file secret patent applications for every single invention that was developed while trying to build the atomic bomb. I have written about this at length in various places and won’t repeat all of that here. Basically, the people working on the bomb project weren’t sure of what would happen after the war, and so were trying to make sure they had iron-clad legal control over the bomb, and the secret patent applications were a way to guarantee government control of nuclear technology with regards to private contractors, private scientists, and universities.

The person who was in charge of all of this work was Captain Robert A. Lavender, USN (Ret.). Lavender was the chief patent officer of the Office for Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), which headed up the civilian functions of the bomb project. Lavender was basically a Navy lawyer who knew intellectual property law inside and out. His job, basically, was to make sure that all of those secret patent applications were properly filed. He knew his stuff and he got it done. By the time the Atomic Energy Commission took over the job, Lavender’s office had docketed reports on over 5,600 different inventions relating to the atomic bomb, with some 2,100 separate patent applications ready to be filed — in secret.

Now, one of the ironies of the Manhattan Project patent program is that it pretty much operated in an opposite way than the rest of the bomb work. The bomb program was defined by its secrecy. You didn’t use the names of real things, you used code-names (“oralloy,” “copper,” “the Gadget”). You didn’t centralize information, you compartmentalized it. You worried about what you needed now, not what you needed in the future. And the patent program was the opposite: you used the real names, with centralized information, because it was about protecting the bomb — legally — for the indefinite future. So from a certain standpoint, the Manhattan Project patent division housed more technical secrets in one place than any other part of the bomb program.

Invention by Oppenheimer, patent by Lavender.

Lavender didn’t do this alone, of course. He had a staff, and each Project site had dozens of lawyers attending technical meetings, looking for inventions, forcing the poor, harried scientists to fill out invention reports. It’s a really amusing idea if you think about it, juxtaposing that familiar narrative of the racing Los Alamos scientists with the dull banality of the legal aspects of patent applications. The local patent officer at Los Alamos, for example, recommended that they allow a “competent disinterested individual” attend the “Trinity” test so they could write a report that would testify to the “reduction to practice” of the first atomic bomb. Talk about the least interesting reason to be at “Trinity” on July 16, 1945.

The second in command at Lavender’s office was Captain Paul P. Stoutenburgh. Stoutenburgh was born in Norwalk, Ohio, on September 25, 1901. He received B.A. from Johns Hopkins in 1923, was married in 1926, and received a law degree from George Washington University in 1928. Stoutenburgh was had worked as an attorney for the Justice Department, in the claims division, and had joined the Army only in July 1945. He was discharged from the Army in February 1946 as a Lieutenant Colonel, and he thereafter resigned from the Justice Department and returned to work for the Office for Scientific Research and Development as a civilian.

When I was researching the atomic patent program, I came across Stoutenburgh’s name occasionally, but it didn’t stand out. His memos to Lavender or others weren’t anything unusual or special — just a guy doing his job. Sometimes he wrote things in Lavender’s name, the way that subordinates often do. I wasn’t drawn to him in any particular way.

But as part of my research into Lavender, I started running his name through various newspaper archives, looking for obituaries, articles, later jobs, and so on. And when I did, suddenly Stoutenburgh showed up, in a horrific way:

On the morning of Saturday April 1, 1946, a friend of Stoutenburgh’s daughter, became alarmed when she did not show up for a roller skating date and no one would answer the phone at the Stoutenburgh residence. They contacted Mrs. Stoutenberg’s brother, and another friend, and together they went to Stoutenberg’s Northwest Washington, DC, home. Finding the Stoutenberg car in the garage, they assumed the worst, and contacted the Sixth Precinct police. Three officers arrived and broke into the house through a back window.

Inside was a scene of horror. Paul Stoutenburgh was wearing his pajamas and a smoking jacket, and was sprawled across his daughter’s bed on his back, with his feet on the floor. Near his hand was a .25-caliber pistol. In his right temple, a bullet wound. He was 44.

His wife, Anna, was face-down, near the door in the same room. She wore a black housecoat. She had a bullet wound in the back of her head, exiting through the skull. She was also 44.

His daughter, Mary Alice, was found unconscious, breathing heavily on the other side of the bed, in her pajamas. She had a bullet wound in her right temple. She was taken to Walter Reed Hospital, without much of hope of survival. She died a week later, without reviving. She was 12.

What happened? According to Stoutenburgh’s former Justice Department colleagues, he had visited them the week before and told them that he’d be returning to the claims division soon. According to Stoutenburgh’s neighbors, he had developed a “‘phobia’ over atomic bomb secrets, which he believed were leaking out despite his repeated recommendations to the War and Navy Departments,” as the Washington Post put it at the time. “Atomic sescrets worried him,” they wrote under his photo — mangling the epitaph.

The War Department, for their part, told the press that “Stoutenburgh had nothing to do with the development of the atomic bomb itself,” and left it at that. Well, yes and no, as we’ve seen. He didn’t build the bomb, but he did help patent it — every part of it.

The newspaper stories implied that Stoutenburgh succumbed to paranoia: he imagined secrets were getting out, and couldn’t take it anymore. The coroner ruled it “homicide-suicide.” The phenomena of male familial murder-suicide is not a new one. These things happen with disturbing frequency. Apparently Stoutenburgh had tried to commit suicide a month previous, and failed.

He was a troubled man in a troubling time. The spring of 1946 was the period of the first real atomic spy scare — the Gouzenko affair. In terms of actual data given away, it was a minor thing; it involved a Canadian spy ring, and General Groves had compartmentalized the Canadians out of pretty much everything he cared about.¹ It was nothing like a Klaus Fuchs situation.

But in the spring of 1946 it was a big deal, both because it was the first such spy scare, and because Groves leaked the news about the espionage to the press that February. Why? Because he wanted Congress to be scared of the Russians, so they would add scarier secrecy provisions to the draft version of the Atomic Energy Act they were considering. And it worked — the changes to the law made in the spring of 1946 are responsible for the problematic “Restricted Data” clause and all of its issues.

Given the context, it’s not surprising that Stoutenburgh’s death briefly made the front pages of several national newspapers. Each played up the “secrets” angle, though the stories themselves make it clear that they are about a man driven mad by fear of secrets getting out, not actual cases of secrets getting out. Therein is the question: Did secrets kill the Stoutenburgh family, or did “secrets” kill them? Was it the thing itself, or just a fear about the thing itself? Or neither?

It doesn’t strike me implausible as that someone who was on the periphery of real policy, but with an acquaintance with secrets, might, in the spring of 1946, get concerned with the loss of secrets, especially if one implies some sort of latent mental illness. But I’m an historian, not a psychologist, so I am not really treading into those waters. Still, I’ve tried to follow this up a bit, and the trail wasn’t very rich for the most part. Stoutenburgh once had an FBI file, but it doesn’t exist anymore.

Specifically, the FBI told me that:

Records which may be responsive to your Freedom of Information-Privacy Acts (FOIPA) request were destroyed on October 1, 2001. Since this material could not be reviewed, it is not known if it actually pertains to your subject.

Now this sounds Kafkaesque, if not a wee bit conspiratorial, but I’ve been assured this is pretty standard boilerplate for a pretty common issue. Somewhere in the FBI’s record database it basically says, “we had a file with this guy’s name on it, but we destroyed it.” Ergo, they don’t really know what was in it anymore. Not so helpful.²

The Washington, DC, Police Department destroyed the records awhile back because of age. The DC Coroner’s Office, likewise. The case had been closed, ruled murder-suicide, so there was no need to keep the files. Army Intelligence had nothing on Stoutenburgh, a FOIA to the National Archives turned up nothing.

But I did find a few little other tidbits in the archives. Because it wasn’t just present-day people who worried about conspiracies — there were Stoutenburgh conspiracy theories back in the day, they just didn’t end up in the newspapers.

The first little nibble comes from the papers of James Burnham. Burnham’s work is pretty well-known — in a nutshell, he was a former Marxist who became an anti-Communist neo-conservative political pundit during the Cold War. You know the type. He wrote a lot, and wrote for the National Review, among other publications. Apparently he also collected rumors about dead patent clerks.

On a memo from December 1951, now in his papers at the Hoover Institution Archives, Burnham wrote that he had been called by someone he listed only as “BL.” I’ve no clue who it is meant to correspond to, but presumably it is someone who worked with Burnham regularly.  Here’s what Burnham wrote:

L stated that a fantastic and sensational story had been brought to him. He felt it essential to try to check any point we could, in order to see whether it has a presumption of truth. Involved is a man named L.t Col. STOUTENBURGH. It is stated that on 31 March 1946 STOUTENBURGH was found shot dead by a bullet in his home in Washington, D.C. His wife and daughter were also shot, presumably also dead. Apparently they were murdered, although the facts were never established. STOUTENBURGH is said to have had a secret job in connection with the atomic bomb, perhaps in something involving British-Canadian-United States liaison.

Apparently a certain E.M. Lee, living in Silver Spring, Maryland, worked with Stoutenburgh at some point. Burnham was told by “BL” that he should call Lee and tell him he was a friend of Bill Offenhauser, of Telenews in New York, and get more information. A few weeks later, Burnham called Edward M. Lee, whose number he got from a telephone directory. He spoke to Lee, who confirmed he was a friend of Offenhauser. Burnham wrote of it:

I then brought up the STOUTENBURGH case. For a minute or two, LEE shied away from the matter, and said nothing to indicate that he knew what I was talking about. Then, he stated that he had not been personally acquainted with STOUTENBURGH but had had certain relations with him. He said that STOUTENBURGH was working in the Patent Office of the ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION (he then corrected himself and said that at that time it was called the Manhattan Project). He (LEE) had been transferred to the Navy, and had certain “business” with STOUTENBURGH, which was transacted by telephone. He said that half a dozen or more times he had telephoned STOUTENBURGH at the latter’s office. He stated that he knew nothing further about him, and nothing about the deaths except of what he had read in the papers. (It was my impression that LEE probably knows a good deal more about STOUTENBURGH that he indicated in his telephone conversation, and that he has thought a good deal about the case.)

Burnham’s other research involved pulling up the various newspaper articles about the Stoutenburgh case. But there the trail ends. It doesn’t add up to a whole lot — even the initial lead was just a suspicion, not anything hard.

The other piece was a memo I found in the archives of the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. In late August 1953, a certain Calvin Bertolotte of New York City got in touch with a Congressman, desiring to talk with someone about “a theory had had which might explain the operations of the Soviet espionage in connection with the atomic program.” He was put in touch with the staff of the Joint Committee, who liked to investigate this sort of thing. Bertolotte was “an employee of the Telefact Foundation engaged in research in information control and world strategy.” He told the Committee staff that he had been a friend or colleague of Sidney Young White, a physicist in New York City.

According to Bertolotte, White had related to him “on several occasions” the story of Stoutenburgh’s death. As the staff noted in their later write-up of their interview, “Bertolotte implied that both he and White imputed espionage significance to the story.”

Basically, Bertolotte and White’s objections to the official story were as follows, with my thoughts in parentheses:

• Stoutenburgh actually did important secret work at the patent office and “had access to vital information.” (True)
• White claimed to have determined that Stoutenburgh only had a .45-calibre weapon, not the .25-calibre one that he was reported to have used. (How would White have known what guns Stoutenburgh could have owned?)
• White knew Stoutenburgh was a poor shot, so how had he hit his wife and child when at least the former was fleeing? (I don’t think you have to be that good a shot at that close a range.)
• White “determined” (doesn’t say how) that Stoutenburgh had mentioned “either to his brother or his brother-in-law” that papers had gone missing from his desk for short periods of time, and would then be returned. (Vaguely sourced.)

Bertolotte thought the FBI ought to get involved, but didn’t want to betray White’s trust, so he gave it to the Joint Committee staff instead. (Um.) The Joint Committee staff asked whether they could relay the information to the FBI for him; Bertolotte asked to check with White first, then later got in touch and said he preferred they not give it to the FBI. The Committee staff member writing this up said that “unless advised to the contrary,” he was going to send all of this to the FBI anyway “despite Bertolotte’s objection.” I have no record as to whether he did this or not.

Where does that leave us? At a minimum, I think, we can agree with the general notion that secrecy engenders this kind of speculation. Monsters manifest within a vacuum of information, and at its peripheries. If this didn’t have any connection to “secrets,” would it stand out above the many other similar tragedies that happen each year? Obviously I wouldn’t be sending out Freedom of Information Act requests left and right if he didn’t have an atomic connection, either.

On the other hand, the fact that someone who had been so close to various secrets died under mysterious circumstances, and seems to have left no trace of any kind of official investigation, is suspicious. If you even sneezed near Los Alamos during World War II, the Manhattan Project security people would have opened a file on you. Why wasn’t there more poking around? (As for me, I poke around in these things compulsively — it’s sort of my job. I am always happy to check into unusual or unlikely stories, though I always try to do so with a skeptical mindset.)

Maybe there was, and it turned up nothing interesting, hence the destruction of the records. But I’ve got to say, the FBI sure kept around records of a lot of less-interesting cases than this one. And we do know that secrets were leaking out of the Manhattan Project during this time, after all. Stoutenburgh might not have known anything “solid” about that, but the fact that there was quite a lot of Soviet spying going on does perhaps raise our estimations of his suspicions.

On the other hand, the idea that, say, the KGB would have killed Stoutenburgh and his family just seems unlikely. Really not their style. In general, killing someone and their whole family is not the quietest way to make accusations of spying go away. Of course, it might still be murder, but if it was, I wouldn’t really suspect the Soviets. If this were a James Ellroy novel, there’d be a murderer, but it wouldn’t really be about the atomic secrets — that would just be the hook that brings the ambitious young detective onto the case in the first place, an opening into a far seedier story. But this isn’t a James Ellroy novel. It’s real life, where banal answers are usually the correct ones.

My eventual conclusion, is that this just another sad story in a world of sad stories. It’s a story, at most, that is about the conspiracy fears that cluster around “secrets” — and the conspiracy fears that follow those conspiracy fears around, decades into the future. In this case, one almost hopes there was something more sinister to it, because it would keep it from seeming so pointlessly tragic. But pointlessly tragic is probably just what it was.

1. Groves let a number of French and Canadian scientists work on a reactor and plutonium separation in Montreal, but it was a strictly one-way information flow. They did good work there, but they didn’t benefit from the support of the rest of the Allied effort.
2. Of course, the mere mention of the year 2001 is going to set off further conspiracy blinkers, but it’s hard to see any connection there.

This was why, in 1947, Secretary of War Henry Stimson put his name on an article in Harpers that February 1947 titled “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb” — it was meant to be the “official” response to the on-going debates and speculation. General Groves, of course, had a heavy role in the composition of the article, not only because he was the guy who had all of the documents at hand, but because it was his legacy on the line, too. In fact, Groves seems to have been fairly responsible for pushing Stimson to publishing something on the subject, even offering up multiple pre-fab drafts drafts for Stimson in November 1946:¹

Click the image for the full set of drafts.

Personally, I don’t wade into these questions much, professionally, or even here on the blog. They honestly don’t interest me very much. Maybe it’s a sign of how post-post-Cold War I am? I don’t know. To me it has always seemed like splitting very fine hairs, trying to make distinctions without much difference. In my mind, the atomic bombings were plainly not ethically very different than the previous firebombings of Japan or Germany. To argue about whether they were justified or not seems to me to be the wrong question — a question that misleads us into mistaking what the core issue was.

For me, the better question is, under what circumstances do we believe the use of weapons of mass destruction on civilians is justified?  That gets one into much more interesting ethical territory, in my opinion, than asking why the bombs were used, a question that seems to presume that the motivations are somehow the most important thing to ask about. It also keeps us from having the same old discussion that people have been having for nearly 70 years. Maybe it’s my post-postness talking, here, but whether people in the past had better or worse intentions before setting a hundred thousand people on fire seems like the least interesting historical question to pose in the face of such actions.

Ruins of 1945: Tokyo at left, Hiroshima at right.

Nevertheless, I do pay some attention to these arguments, mostly because I get asked about this sort of thing from time to time (one of the hazards of being an historian of such matters) and it helps to have a snappy answer or two. So I was really interested to hear, at a workshop in DC a few weeks ago convened by the Atomic Heritage Foundation (more on the workshop and its purpose in a later post), the retired NRC historian J. Samuel Walker give a brief talk on the current state of the historiography over the “decision to use the bomb.” Walker wrote an article on this subject in 1990, a book in 1997, and another historiographical review in 2005.

I hadn’t met Walker before this, but I’ve reviewed two of his books (one on Three Mile Island, another on US nuclear waste policy), and had appreciated and drawn upon his work as an historian. Walker is, as he put it, “a flaming moderate,” and it comes out in his work. Both of those books are great — for TMI, he has a nice balance of technical detail with political/bureaucratic considerations (and a great chapter on the long-term effects on the nuclear industry); for nuclear waste, he does a great job of being strictly factual while pointing out exactly where he saw the US government underestimating the problem and failing to appreciate how much they were losing public faith. As with all moderates, he runs the risk of disappointing partisans of all sides, but that’s the nature of it.

Portraits from Time magazine covers, 1945: Stalin, Truman, Hirohito. Each kind of tacky in their own way, each kind of brilliant in their own way.

Walker mapped out two major poles on the “decision to use the bomb” question. (I should say up front that this is my synthesis of Walker’s synthesis, re-written from memory. So it’s possible I may be inadvertently mangling this a bit, though I don’t think I am. There are other sub-arguments to this debate, of course, but to me this boils it down to the really crucial bits nicely.) The first is the “traditional” argument, which roughly follows the position put forward by Stimson in 1947. At its core, it argues, in brief:

• that Truman made a decision to use the bomb on the basis of ending the war quickly;
• the as far as the US was concerned, Japan would not surrender on acceptable terms without either the bomb or invasion;
• and that of those two options, the bomb was the option that would cost the least number of American and Japanese lives;
• and, as the Japanese Emperor acknowledged in his surrender statement, the bomb did in fact end the war promptly.

This is, of course, the argument that most people are familiar with. The other pole, according to Walker, is what is often called the “revisionist” take, a term acknowledged as potentially disparaging, and is expressed most forcefully in the work of Gar Alperovitz. At its core, it argues, in brief:

• that Japan was already defeated at the time the decision to use the bomb was made, and that US intelligence already knew this;
• that Japan had been suing for peace and was ready to surrender without an invasion;
• that the real reason the bomb was used was so to demonstrate its power to the Soviet Union, in an attempt to exert more influence on them in the postwar;
• and that Japanese Emperor’s surrender statement invoked the bomb only as a politically-acceptable “excuse” for his people, when actually he surrendered primarily because of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria.

There are, of course, more details that people have hashed out over the years, including the infamous “how many casualties in an invasion” question. In the 1990s in particular, these were fiercely debated. It was, of course, the immediate post-Cold War, and everybody was still in a mood of assessment of trying to make out what the Cold War’s legacy actually was.

So where are we now, firmly in the 2010s? Walker reported that in his assessment, the scholarly debate had cooled down quite a bit, and that a new consensus was emerging, something that could be visualized firmly in between the two poles. There were problems, he argued, with both the “traditional” and the “revisionist” views. Specifically:

• It’s not really clear that Truman ever made much of a “decision,” or regarded the bomb/invasion issue as being mutually exclusive. Truman didn’t know if the bomb would end the war; he hoped, but he didn’t know, couldn’t know. The US was still planning to invade in November 1945. They were planning to drop as many atomic bombs as necessary. There is no contemporary evidence that suggests Truman was ever told that the causalities would be X if the bomb was dropped, and Y if it was not. There is no evidence that, prior to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that Truman was particularly concerned with Japanese causalities, radiation effects, or whether the bombs were ethical or not. The entire framing of the issue is ahistorical, after-the-fact, here. It was war; Truman had atomic bombs; it was taken for granted, at that point, that they were going to be used. 
• Defeat is not surrender. Japan was certainly defeated by August 1945, in the sense that there was no way for them to win; the US knew that. But they hadn’t surrendered, and the peace balloons they had put out would have assumed not that the Emperor would have stayed on as some sort of benign constitutional monarch (much less a symbolic monarch), but would still be the god-head of the entire Japanese country, and still preserve the overall Japanese state. This was unacceptable to the US, and arguably not for bad reasons. Japanese sources show that the Japanese military was willing to bleed out the country to exact this sort of concession from the US.
• American sources show that the primary reason for using the bomb was to aid in the war against Japan. However, the fact that such weapons would be important in the postwar period, in particular vis-à-vis the USSR, was not lost on American policymakers. It is fair to say that there were multiple motivations for dropping the bomb, and specifically that it looks like there was a primary motivation (end the war) and many other “derivative” benefits that came from that (postwar power).
• Japanese sources, especially those unearthed and written about by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, make it clear that prior to the use of the atomic bombs, the Japanese cabinet was still planning on fighting a long battle against invasion, that they were hoping to exact the aforementioned concessions from the United States, and that they were aware (and did not care) that such an approach would cost the lives of huge numbers of Japanese civilians. It is also clear that the two atomic bombs did shock them immensely, and did help break the stalemate in the cabinet — but that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria also shocked them immensely, perhaps equally, maybe even more (if you have a choice between being occupied by Truman or occupied by Stalin, the decision is an easy one). But there is no easy way to disentangle the effects of the bombs or the Soviet invasion, in this sense — they were both immensely influential on the final decision. That being said, using the bomb as an “excuse” (as opposed to “we are afraid of Russians”) did play well with the Japanese public and made surrender appear to be a sensible, viable option in a culture where surrender was seen as a complete loss of honor.

So what we’re left with is something that, in my view, looks a lot more plausible than either the “traditional” or “revisionist” options, both of which assume way more prescience than actual historical actors usually have. (Much less Truman, of all people. In my view, even wondering what Truman thought about this is the wrong question to ask — Truman was many things, but he was not a thoughtful guy. He makes Eisenhower look like a French philosopher by comparison.)

One of the more post-modern Time magazine covers — where the atomic bomb unseats Truman as Man of the Year. Or something.

The are genres of historical explanation that people find compelling. This is something that goes a bit beyond the historical facts themselves: it is the superstructure in which we interpret the facts, or, to put it another way, it is how we think about everything that’s going on that doesn’t end up in the archival record.

What I find compelling about Walker’s “consensus” view is that it is much more of a muddle than either the “traditional” view or the “revisionist” view. The “traditional” view makes it look like Truman et al. were making carefully reasoned decisions based on an ethics of the bomb that had not developed, based on questions that were not yet being asked. I don’t really believe for a minute that Truman worried much about the first use of the atomic bomb. But the “revisionist” view makes him still look too clever by half — too scheming, too anticipatory, too prescient about both the Japanese war and the Cold War. That’s not the Truman I know. The “consensus” view is much more human looking: the people in it are half-way acting consciously, half-way caught up in things that had been going on for a long time and were by then out of their active control. Of course, in retrospect, everyone wants to re-write history to make them look better, especially when they’re being criticized for past actions. That’s part of being human, too.

Walker also posited that along with this emerging consensus, there was also a cooling in the tone of the debate. This was immediately proved to be somewhat premature, as Peter Kuznik, another attendee to the workshop (who I consider a friend), vigorously defended the “revisionist” point of view. Well, so it goes — there’s no better way to prove an argument among scholars than to propose that there really isn’t much of an argument anymore. Still, I found Walker’s synthesis a useful way of framing the field of historical argumentation, summing up a number of disparate positions (each with books and books of documents and footnotes debating each tiny point) in a fairly convenient format. And what can I say — I’m a sucker for moderate, synthetic arguments.

1. Citation: Leslie R. Groves to Harvey H. Bundy, drafts of “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb” (6 November 1945), Correspondence (“Top Secret”) of the Manhattan Engineer District, 1942-1946, microfilm publication M1109 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1980), Roll 3, Target 5, Folder 20, “Miscellaneous.”

Aerial view of B Reactor at the Hanford Site: isolated and mysterious. Photo: Hanford DDRS, #N1D0030582.

The secrecy at Hanford at Oak Ridge led to lots of speculation about what they were about from those who worked on them and those who lived near them. The Manhattan Project security people, of course, tracked these rumors, both because they occasionally resulted in problems (like inquiries from Congressmen, including a very dubious Senator Harry Truman) and could also potentially lead to attention from journalists, which could in turn lead to real leaks. In general the whole point of Manhattan Project security was to keep people from noticing there was an entirely new industry being created under their noses, and so curious rumors didn’t really help that.

In a sense, this was an inevitable result of the very secrecy they were trying to impose. “Absolute secrecy,” where the fact that there is a secret is itself a secret, leads to all sorts of rampant speculation. Into a total vacuum marches total speculation. My favorite wartime rumor about Oak Ridge is that it was a model socialist community following the beliefs of Eleanor Roosevelt. One can contrast this “absolute secrecy” approach to the “known secret” approach that followed after Hiroshima and Nagasaki: finally, the security people could say, “it’s involved in the atomic bomb, and thus its a secret.” It’s a very different type of secrecy regime.

Squirreled away in the Manhattan Project security files is a really remarkable poem, penned by an unknown source. (I was reminded of it when posting about that “Secret song” earlier this week.) The poem is really quite amazing, in that it ties the bad working conditions at Hanford and the secrecy up into one neat package, and does so to verse as well! I reproduce the poem, “Restricted Information,” below in its entirety.¹

“RESTRICTED INFORMATION”

It is a “Military Secret”
And I shouldn’t breath a word
But if you will promise not to tell
I’ll tell you what I’ve heard.

What is building here at Hanford
Is quite a mystery
But I’ve found out what it is
And will confide in thee.

It is a torture ground for Hitler
And all his Nazi bunch
And all the other Axis rats
After the final punch.

That he’ll have to live here
Should be bad enough itself
But nothing is quite appropriate
When it comes to his future health.

And so we are spending millions
And considerable effort too
To perfect conditions unbearable
For all the motley crew.

I’ve told you more than I should have
And the details — I wouldn’t dare
That is why it is such a secret —
It would give Hitler too great a scare.

The war might be prolonged
Hitler staving off defeat
With knowledge of his Hanford fate
He would be truly hard to beat.

So promise not to tell a soul
Unless they swear secrecy
For what I have just told
Might put off Victory.

So, in other words, Hanford was so secret, and so miserable, because someday Hitler and his Axis buddies would have to go live there. If they found out how miserable it was to work there, they’d all fight to the death. Pretty cute. You can view the original here.

You’ll note that they classified the entire thing “RESTRICTED,”² which is somewhat ironic, given the content, no? But it makes sense, given the logic of “absolute secrecy” – when the secret is itself a secret, even things that lampoon the secret are thus secret as well. 

1. Citation: “Restricted Information,” (n.d., ca. 1945), Manhattan Engineer District (MED) records, Records of the Army Corps of Engineers, RG 77, National Archives and Records Administration, Box 66, “Security (317-2).”
2. “RESTRICTED” was the lowest ranking of classification during World War II. It went from “SECRET” to “CONFIDENTIAL” to “RESTRICTED,” and during the war they added “TOP SECRET” as well. In the 1950s they got rid of “RESTRICTED” as a classification category because it was confusing to have both it and “restricted data” together in the same schema.