Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States

by Alex Wellerstein

On the day in April 1933 when he decided to flee from Berlin to Vienna, the train he took was essentially empty. One day later, the same train was overcrowded and stopped at the border, and everyone on it was interrogated. Szilard later related the impact this had on his thinking: “This just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier than most people.

In one case, a scientist’s own thesis became classified and unavailable to him, and in another case, a scientist found his draft exemption revoked, and he was inducted into the military.

Another episode involved experimental work with radioactive substances on human subjects who had not given “informed consent.” Some of the most ethically problematic of these involved the injection of plutonium into terminally ill patients between 1945 and 1947 without the patients’ knowledge, not because the injections would provide any therapeutic benefit, but because the scientists desired information on the rate at which plutonium was excreted by the human body in order to set occupational exposure limits in Manhattan Project and AEC facilities.

The author of the article submitted an even longer article to Harper’s Magazine on “How to Make an Atom Bomb,” which again made its way to the AEC in draft form. In this instance, Salibury’s associate director replied that the AEC policy remained that they could only say “no comment” on the specific speculations, since to do otherwise would indicate what was sensitive information. But the reply continued: “The areas in which we can make no comment are as follows . . . ,” and then listed the precise topics of concern in the article, with references to the paragraphs that contained the sensitive information. Harper’s made the changes, and the article was duly declared to be “unclassified” by the AEC Declassification Branch.

If the AEC had grown less “special” as its organizational procedures calcified and nuclear technology had become less unusual, the DOE was the apotheosis of these processes: a vast bureaucracy that had little ideological force motivating it other than its own continued existence and such a wide docket of pursuits under the heading of “energy” that over time the public would frequently forget its historical origins in the atomic bomb.