Posts Tagged ‘Resources’

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Nuclear history bibliography, 2012

Friday, December 28th, 2012

As 2012 draws to a close, I thought it might be useful to try and draw together a bibliography of nuclear history scholarship that was published over the course of the year.

Some TOP SECRET stamps from the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy files. Just inserted here so there is something to look at other than text!

This list is unlikely to be complete — I’ve made something of a preliminary survey, but I don’t claim to have checked everywhere — and if there are things I’m missing, please let me know in the comments or by e-mail. I’ll update this as new information comes in. One obvious thing missing are chapters in edited volumes; those are harder to find using traditional academic search engines.

As for the “rules for inclusion,” they are both boring and common-sensical. Must have a publication date of 2012. Must look like “scholarship” of some sort. Must be something that is primarily in the genre of the history of nuclear weapons or nuclear power. I’m just trying to make a useful list here (for myself as well as others) and some inclusions/exclusions are going to be necessarily arbitrary. I have not read all of these — not even most of these — I do not endorse any of them. This is just a list. The citations might not be complete; it is just a guide. I thought about including book reviews, which are often quite useful and insightful (and hey, I wrote a few), but decided it would make this list completely ungainly and my task disproportionately difficult. 

Looking this over, the obvious trend is that 2012 was the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which meant a lot of monographs on the subject came out this year. Without further ado…

BOOKS

Barrett, David M. and Max Holland. Blind over Cuba: The Photo Gap and the Missile Crisis. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012.

Blight, James G. The armageddon letters: Kennedy, Khrushchev, Castro in the Cuban missile crisis. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012.

Brown, Andrew. Keeper of the Nuclear Conscience: The Life and Work of Joseph Rotblat. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Burke, David Allen. Atomic testing in Mississippi: Project Dribble and the quest for nuclear weapons treaty verification in the Cold War era. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012.

Burtch, Andrew. Give Me Shelter: The Failure of Canada’’s Cold War Civil Defence. University of British Columbia Press, 2012.

Coleman, David G. The fourteenth day: JFK and the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York : W.W. Norton & Co., 2012.

Fraser, Gordon. The quantum exodus: Jewish fugitives, the atomic bomb, and the Holocaust. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Fuhrmann, Matthew. Atomic assistance: how “atoms for peace” programs cause nuclear insecurity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012.

Gavin, Francis J. Nuclear statecraft: history and strategy in America’s atomic age. Cornell University Press, 2012.

Gibson, David R. Talk at the brink: deliberation and decision during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

Hecht, Gabrielle. Being nuclear: Africans and the global uranium trade. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012.1.

Heefner, Gretchen. The missile next door: the Minuteman in the American heartland. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Hosaka, Masayasu. [Japan's Atomic Bomb : Its Development and Procedural Setbacks] Nihon no genbaku: sono kaihatsu to zasetsu no dōtei / 日本の原爆: その開発と挫折の道程 . Tōkyō: Shinchōsha, 2012.

Hymans, Jacques E. C. Achieving Nuclear Ambitions: Scientists, Politicians, and Proliferation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Iversen, Kristen. Full body burden: growing up in the nuclear shadow of Rocky Flats. New York: Crown Publishers, 2012.2

Johnson, Robert R. Romancing the atom: nuclear infatuation from the radium girls to Fukushima. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2012.

Kaufman, Scott. Project Plowshare: The Peaceful Use of Nuclear Explosives in Cold War America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012.

Khalatnikov, Isaak M. From the Atomic Bomb to the Landau Institute: Autobiography. Top Non-Secret. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2012.

Khan, Feroz Hassan. Eating grass: the making of the Pakistani bomb. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Larsen, Jeffrey Arthur. Rearming at the dawn of the Cold War: Louis Johnson, George Marshall, and Robert Lovett, 1949-1952. Washington, DC: National Defense University Press for the Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2012.

Matthews, Melvin E. Duck and cover: civil defense images in film and television from the Cold War to 9/11. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2012.

Mikoyan, Sergo, and Svetalana Savranskaya, ed. The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis: Castro, Mikoyan, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the missiles of November. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Miyamoto, Yuki. Beyond the mushroom cloud: commemoration, religion, and responsibility after Hiroshima. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.

Monk, Ray. Inside the centre: the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer. London, Jonathan Cape, 2012.

Munton, Don. The Cuban Missile Crisis: a concise history. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012

Priestley, Rebecca. Mad on radium: New Zealand in the atomic age. Auckland, N.Z.: Auckland University Press, 2012.

Schweber, S. S. Nuclear forces: the making of the physicist Hans Bethe. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Stern, Sheldon M. The Cuban Missile Crisis in American memory: myths versus reality. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Stoddart, Kristan. Losing an empire and finding a role: Britain, the USA, NATO and nuclear weapons, 1964-70. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ;New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Szasz, Ferenc M. Atomic Comics: Cartoonists Confront the Nuclear World. Reno, Nevada: University of Nevada Press, 2012.

Takahashi, Hiroko. [Closing Hiroshima & Nagasaki: The American Nuclear Experiment and Civil Defense Planning] Fūinsareta Hiroshima, Nagasaki: Bei kakujikken to minkan bōei keikaku / 封印されたヒロシマ・ナガサキ: 米核実験と民間防衛計画. Tōkyō: Gaifūsha, 2012.

Taubman, Philip. The Partnership: Five Cold War Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers, 2012.

Touze, Vincent. Missiles et décisions: Castro, Kennedy et Khrouchtchev et la crise de Cuba d’octobre 1962. Bruxelles: Versaille, 2012.

Walker, John R. Britain and disarmament: the UK and nuclear, biological and chemical weapons arms control and programmes, 1956-1975. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012.

Van Lente, Dick, ed. The nuclear age in popular media: a transnational history, 1945-1965. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Weart, Spencer R. The rise of nuclear fear. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Wilson, Jim. Britain on the brink: the Cold War’s most dangerous weekend, 27-28 October 1962. Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military, 2012.

Yamamoto, Akihiro. [A Discourse on the Postwar History of Nuclear Energy, 1945-1960 : "Memories of the Bomb" and "Dreams of Nuclear Power] Kaku enerugī gensetsu no sengoshi, 1945-1960: “hibaku no kioku” to “genshiryoku no yume” / 核エネルギー言說の戦後史, 1945-1960: 「被爆の記憶」と「原子力の夢」. Kyōto-shi: Jinbun Shoin, 2012.

Zellen, Barry Scott. State of doom: Bernard Brodie, the bomb, and the birth of the bipolar world. London: Continuum, 2012.

ARTICLES

Børresen, Hans Christofer. “Flawed Nuclear Physics and Atomic Intelligence in the Campaign to deny Norwegian Heavy Water to Germany, 1942–1944.” Physics in Perspective 14, no. 4 (2012).

Connelly, Matthew, Matt Fay, Giulia Ferrini, Micki Kaufman, Will Leonard, Harrison Monsky, Ryan Musto, Taunton Paine, Nicholas Standish, and Lydia Walker. “‘General, I Have Fought Just as Many Nuclear Wars as You Have’: Forecasts, Future Scenarios, and the Politics of Armageddon.” The American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (2012).3

Dvorak, Darrell F. “The Other Atomic Bomb Commander: Col. Cliff Heflin and his ‘Special’ 216th AAF Base Unit.” Air Power History 59, no. 4 (Winter 2012).

Dorn, A. Walter, and Robert Pauk. “The closest brush: How a UN secretary-general averted doomsday.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68, no. 6 (November/December 2012).

Edwards, Paul N. “Entangled histories: Climate science and nuclear weapons research.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68, no. 4 (July/August 2012).

Fischer, Benjamin B. “Anglo-American Intelligence and the Soviet War Scare: The Untold Story.” Intelligence and National Security 27, no. 1 (February 2012).

Geist, Edward. “Was There a Real ‘Mineshaft Gap’?: Bomb Shelters in the USSR, 1945–1962.” Journal of Cold War Studies 14, no. 2 (Spring 2012).

Goodson, Donald L. R. “Catalytic Deterrence? Apartheid South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Strategy.” Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies 32, no. 2 (2012).

Grant, Matthew. “British nuclear weapons and the test ban, 1954–73: Britain, the United States weapons policies and nuclear testing: tensions and contradictions.” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 10, no. 3 (September 2012).

Hamblin, Jacob Darwin. “Fukushima and the Motifs of Nuclear History.” Environmental History 17, no. 2 (2012).

Hastings, Justin V. “The geography of nuclear proliferation networks: the case of A.Q. Khan.” Nonproliferation Review 19, no. 3 (2012).

Hecht, Gabrielle. “An elemental force: Uranium production in Africa, and what it means to be nuclear.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68, no. 2 (March/April 2012).

Higuchi, Toshihiro. “‘Genshi maguro’ no tanjō: Dai go Fukuryū maru jiken go no kankyō hōshanō sokutei jō no hantei kijun no hensen” [The Birth of “Atomic Tuna”: Changes in the Administrative Criteria for Environmental Radiation Monitoring in Japan after the Lucky Dragon Incident of 1954], Seibutsugakushi kenkyū [Japanese Journal of the History of Biology] 87 (2012).

Hogg, Jonathan and Christoph Laucht. “Introduction: British Nuclear Culture.” British Journal for the History of Science 45, no. 4 (December 2012).

Jasper, Ursula. “The ambivalent neutral: rereading Switzerland’s nuclear history.” Nonproliferation Review 19, no. 2 (2012).

Johnston, Sean F. “Making the invisible engineer visible: DuPont and the recognition of nuclear expertise.” Technology and Culture 53, no. 3 (2012).

Jolivette, Catherine. “Science, Art and Landscape in the Nuclear Age.” Art History 35, no. 2 (April 2012).

Kemp, R. Scott. “The end of Manhattan: How the gas centrifuge changed the quest for nuclear weapons.” Technology and Culture 53, no. 2 (2012).4

Kinney, D.J. “The otters of Amchitka: Alaskan nuclear testing and the birth of the environmental movement.” The Polar Journal 2, no. 2 (December 2012).

Kirk, Andrew. “Rereading the Nature of Atomic Doom Towns.” Environmental History 17, no. 3 (2012).

Krige, John. “Hybrid knowledge: the transnational co-production of the gas centrifuge for uranium enrichment in the 1960s.” British Journal for the History of Science 45, no. 3 (2012).

Krige, John. “The proliferation risks of gas centrifuge enrichment at the dawn of the NPT: Shedding light on the negotiating history.” Nonproliferation Review 19, no. 2 (2012).5

Lewis, John W. and Xue Litai. “Making China’s nuclear war plan.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists  68, no. 5 (September/October 2012).

Malloy, Sean L. “‘A very pleasant way to die’: Radiation effects and the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan.” Diplomatic History 36, no. 3 (2012).6

Mundey, Lisa M. “The Civilianization of a Nuclear Weapon Effects Test: Operation ARGUS.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 42, no. 4 (2012).

Norris, Robert S. and Hans M. Kristensen. “The Cuban Missile Crisis: A nuclear order of battle, October and November 1962.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68, no. 6 (November/December 2012).7))

Overpeck, Deron. ”‘Remember! it’s Only a Movie!’ Expectations and Receptions of The Day After (1983).” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 32, no. 2 (June 2012).

Robb, Thomas. “Nuclear Illusion, Nuclear Reality: Britain, the United States and Nuclear Weapons, 1958–64.” The International History Review 34, no. 2 (2012).

Sethi, Megan Barnhart. ”Information, Education, and Indoctrination: The Federation of American Scientists and Public Communication Strategies in the Atomic Age.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 42, no. 1 (2012).

Sime, Ruth Lewin. “The Politics of Forgetting: Otto Hahn and the German Nuclear-Fission Project in World War II.” Physics in Perspective 14, no. 1 (2012).

Slaney, Patrick David. “Eugene Rabinowitch, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the Nature of Scientific Internationalism in the Early Cold War.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 42, no. 2 (2012).

Sobek, David, Dennis M. Foster, and Samuel B. Robison. “Conventional Wisdom? The Effect of Nuclear Proliferation on Armed Conflict, 1945-2001.” International Studies Quarterly 56, no. 1 (March 2012).

Theaker, Martin. “Elemental Germans: Klaus Fuchs, Rudolf Peierls and the Making of British Nuclear Culture 1939–59.” Contemporary British History 26, no. 4 (December 2012).

Tobey, William. “Nuclear scientists as assassination targets.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68, no. 1 (January/February 2012).8

Walker, John R. “Potential Proliferation Pointers from the Past: Lessons from the British Nuclear Weapons Program, 1952–69.” Nonproliferation Review 19, no. 1 (2012).9

Weisiger, Marsha. “Happy Cly and the Unhappy History of Uranium Mining on the Navajo Reservation.” Environmental History 17, no. 1 (2012).

Wellerstein, Alex. “A tale of openness and secrecy: The Philadelphia Story.” Physics Today 65, no. 5 (2012).10

Wellock, Thomas R. “Engineering Uncertainty and Bureaucratic Crisis at the Atomic Energy Commission, 1964–1973.” Technology and Culture 53, no. 4 (2012).

Wilson, Richard. “The Development of Risk Analysis: A Personal Perspective.” Risk Analysis 32, Issue 12 (December 2012).

Acknowledgements

Some of the citations I got from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues; others were found from keyword searches against the Harvard Library catalog (old habits die hard) and some publisher-specific searches. Google Scholar proved to be no help whatsoever — too much noise, too little signal, too hard to filter by discipline. Thanks to my old friend Anthony Walker for helping me with the Japanese translations. Thanks to Will Thomas and Michael Gordin for giving this a look-see before I put it up. If I’ve missed something or screwed something up — highly likely — please get in touch.

Notes
  1. I wrote an essay-review of this for Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences under the title “Nuclear others,” available here. [↩]
  2. Iversen’s biographical account of Rocky Flats was discussed by me in part here. [↩]
  3. Winner of the 2012 “Wow That’s a Lot of Co-Authors Award.” [↩]
  4. I discussed Kemp’s article on the development of the centrifuge here. [↩]
  5. I discussed these Krige articles on US-UK centrifuge history in this post. [↩]
  6. For a discussion (and review) of Malloy’s article on radiation effects, see my post here. [↩]
  7. For a discussion of Norris and Kristensen’s accounting of those nukes in Cuba and elsewhere, see my post here. [↩]
  8. A little discussion of Tobey’s article on nuclear assassination is here, along with my own thoughts. [↩]
  9. Winner of the 2012 “Most Alliterative Article Award.” [↩]
  10. My article on the “Philadelphia Story” is discussed and linked-to here. [↩]

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Meditations

More “Fun” with NUKEMAP

Monday, February 6th, 2012

I’ve been chuffed by the reception of NUKEMAP. Since I posted it last Friday morning, nearly 700 people have nuked themselves, or others, using it. There have been over 1,500 individual “detonations.” Shockingly, this impressive number is still 500 fewer than the number of actual nuclear detonations that have been performed by nuclear states as part of their nuclear testing regimes.

Who got nuked? I started keeping statistics as to where people were nuking a few hours after posting the original NUKEMAP. Here’s an image of the 1,500 detonations plotted onto their respective locations (the circle sizes are just icons, they don’t correspond with actual detonation sizes, some of which are ridiculous):

“We Will All Go Together When We Go,” unless you live in central Eurasia, sub-Saharan Africa, western Australia, or Canada north of the border. Or Spain, for whatever reason. (They’ve had it bad enough as it is, I think.) Here’s a detail of the United States:

I don’t want to give out deeper granularity than the above image, just for privacy reasons (you know, in case you nuked your own house). (There is an “opt-out” checkbox on the NUKEMAP page, if you don’t want me seeing where you’ve nuked.) I will say, though, that my boss owned up to nuking Punxsutawney Phil back to the stone age.

I’ve been having fun with this myself on the technical side. I keep tinkering with the code — optimizing it, making it more flexible, adding features, and so on. Here are some interesting things for you to try out  which I added over the last weekend:

  • Try nuking Hiroshima, Japan, with the Little Boy bomb.
  • Try nuking the Trinity test site with the Fat Man bomb.
  • Try nuking the Bikini Atoll with the Castle Bravo bomb.

For all of these, you need fairly precise targeting, so use the preset menu. I’ve got a few other things I’m planning to add to it, over time. (If nothing “special” happens, make sure you have reloaded the page a few time, in case your browser is caching it. And pay attention to your options on the right-hand menu, as some of the special bits don’t enable automatically.) None of these additions are scientifically accurate — they involve some rough transitioning as they get adapted from still photographs to Google Earth coordinates — but they’re probably not too wrong.

You can also now plot multiple nuclear blasts if you are so inclined. If you click the “detach” button, the existing detonation circles will be “locked” wherever you have put them, and you will be given a new marker to target with. Use the “clear” button to clear all plotted effects.

I’m an historian, so I’m constantly curious about whether these scaling codes work well with “real world” nuclear landmarks. In a few places, you can see exactly how close they are. Here’s the crater from the Sedan test at the Nevada Test Site, which was a purposeful attempt to make a big hole in the ground. It matches up pretty exactly with a 104kt model fireball, which one would expect, given how the point of the Sedan test was to make maximal use of the explosion:

Also check-able is the massive crater caused by the detonation of Ivy Mike, the first hydrogen bomb (10.4 Mt):

Pretty cool, no? Well, I thought it was.

I have a few more mapping projects in the works (at least two), and a few more goodies I’m planning to add to the existing NUKEMAP. I’ve also got a few ideas about adding fallout approximations to NUKEMAP, which could be interesting.

If you think up something clever that NUKEMAP might be able to do, please feel free to post it as a comment here or to send me an e-mail. I’m finding the Google Maps API much improved over the last time I played with it, a few years ago, and it’s letting me translate these ideas into “realities” much more quickly than I imagined.

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Visions

Presenting NUKEMAP

Friday, February 3rd, 2012

Update: NUKEMAP has had well over a million “detonations” since it was first made public. I’m both agog and aghast. Click here for a FAQ of sorts.

This Friday, instead of giving you an image like I normally do, I’m giving you a little application to make your own images.

There are lots of nuclear effects calculators out there on the web.1 But I was never fully satisfied with how these looked, or with their interfaces. (Of course, purists don’t require apps.)

So over the last few days, I put together my own nuclear effects calculator, which I am calling NUKEMAP, only because “Alex’s Nuclear Effects Calculator” was deemed by a colleague as “unsexy.”

What makes this one so great? Check out these features:

  • Easily draggable target marker (which has an adorable little atom on it)!
  • Bright, stomach-churning colors indicating major negative effects of atomic detonations!
  • Effects described include zones of 500 rem exposure, major overpressures, and fire! Plus, the legend breaks these down into easy-to-understand descriptions of what they mean for your average person caught inside of them.
  • Lots of pre-sets for both places to drop them (I didn’t want to discriminate) and yields of historical weapons! It has never been easier to put a 50Mt H-bomb on the Eiffel Tower.
  • Automatically tries to drop the bomb on wherever Google thinks you are accessing the Internet from (based on your IP address)!
  • You can link to specific detonations and send them to your friends to enjoy forever!
  • Automatic zooming to make sure that all of a given nuke’s effects fit within the view window! (This can be disabled.)
  • More historically contextualized than your average web app!

I have in the past made maps of this sort for use in teaching, when I want to emphasize how “impressive” the first hydrogen bomb was when compared to the first atomic bombs. If you dropped a Fat Man-style bomb onto downtown Boston, the results wouldn’t be pretty, but the effects would be limited to the immediate area surrounding the peninsula, primarily. (In other words, I would tell the students, Harvard is probably not too bad off, fallout excepting, but MIT is completely fried.) Do the same thing with an Ivy Mike-sized bomb and you’ve set houses on fire all the way out to Concord (a visual argument, when done with appropriate build-up and theatricality, that never failed to result in a horrified gasp from the auditorium of undergrads). It becomes quite clear why many of the atomic scientists of the day considered H-bombs to be exclusively genocidal weapons.

Of course, all such mappers fail to take into account terrain and building differences. Someday, I have no doubt, the Google Maps API will evolve to a level where that will be possible, but not today. It would also be wonderful to have it automatically guess as to the level of megadeaths (which wouldn’t be to hard if you could automatically find population sizes within a given circle radius) but this also is not something easily done with Google Maps (though again, someday I bet it will be possible). It also doesn’t do anything to gauge fallout — this is in part because calculating fallout paths is hard if you are not just being hand-wavy about it, and that even being hand-wavy about it is hard to depict in Google Maps because it doesn’t natively support drawing ellipses as opposed to circles. But there are work-arounds to this, and maybe someday this mapper will support basic fallout trajectories.

Technical credit and caveat: the scaling equations are all adapted from the wonderful Nuclear Weapons FAQ by Carey Sublette. They are approximate scaling equations and they assume optimum burst height. So they are not going to be perfect for estimating ground bursts, and they are probably a little hand-wavy when you talk about bombs at the margins (very tiny or very huge yields).

NUKEMAP should be more or less compatible with any browsers that support the latest Google Maps API (v.3).

Wish this did something that it doesn’t? Let me know. I’m all ears for good suggestions and I find this stuff more fun than is probably healthy.

And maybe you do, too. As one of my AIP colleagues wrote to me: “It’s weird to say that it’s fun…  but I just blew up Chicago!”

Notes
  1. The two most prominent via Google are one written in Java at FAS and one called the HYDESim which only shows overpressures. There is also this one that does thermal damage only. And this one from Graham Allison that I wasn’t aware of until after writing NUKEMAP. And this one which also does thermal effects. [↩]

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Redactions

Excerpts from the Klaus Fuchs File (1951)

Wednesday, January 25th, 2012

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

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

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

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

Click image to view the PDF.

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

Read the full post »

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

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Meditations

Web-based Primary Sources for Nuclear History

Monday, November 14th, 2011

Right now, across the world, there are students taking or planning on taking courses on the history of the atomic bomb. The history of the bomb has been and will probably always be (for better or worse) a relevant topic, and students are drawn to it for a variety of reasons. Some are better than others…

Source: Cartoon by Peter Arno, The New Yorker (April 6, 1963), p. 42.

Fortunately for these students, writing really impressive term papers on the atomic bomb is easier today than it has probably ever been, in part because the amount of primary source research material about the history of nuclear weapons available through the web is actually quite large — if you know where to go.

Below is a list of the most useful web archives relevant to writing papers on the atomic bomb that I have come across in my own research. My intention is to keep this somewhat up to date over time, and I’d love feedback, in the comments or via e-mail, if I’ve missed something, or something goes dead. I’ve omitted academic journals, magazines (for the most part), and blogs, just because this would be a somewhat unmanageable list and one of a very different character. This list is for primary sources only, and those available without stepping foot into an actual archive. Some are pretty specific in what they cover, and some are more general.

I’ve divided them up into open (free) access databases, subscription-only databases, and a few other miscellaneous useful resources. I don’t know how common the subscription databases are among university libraries these days — I was long spoiled by Harvard Library’s copious e-resources — but at least knowing what is out there might be useful for people.

Read the full post »

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