Alex Wellerstein

I recommend again and again Alex Wellerstein's blog on all those topics: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com

Both are excellent books. Further Reading: “Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety” by Eric Schlosser “Nuclear War: A Scenario” by Annie Jacobsen “Restricted Data: A Nuclear History Blog” by Alex Wellerstein; https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/ Technical reference. https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/

Here are a couple I follow over on datente.com, or that I check on a periodic basis: - https://www.filfre.net <- the Digital Antiquarian - https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com <- Restricted Data - https://www.c82.net <- C82, the works of Nicholas Rougeux - https://history.stackexchange.com/questions <- History.SE ... as with any SE site, there are pros and cons - but a lot more "pros" than "cons", imo

This is by Alex Wellerstein, who is unparalleled when it comes to writing about nuclear weapon history. His occasional blog http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/ is an excellent read.

The author, Alex Wellerstein, will blog more about this topic and these related: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com The FOIA request files he obtained and on which he based his article (and will also be among the sources of his upcoming book) are still unpublished, but he already published on his blog a sample: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Wheeler-FBI… "a short (24-page) excerpt from Wheeler’s FBI file" There you can see some copies of the letters directly signed by John Edgar Hoover, probably typed on IBM Executive A with a beautiful proportional font, even in 1953. The blog is worth reading for those who are interested in the topic, and also the upcoming book.

No problem! There's no way for us to know about things that are so classified that only a few people have seen it all. NSA hacks aside, the US Government keeps a tight lid on these sorts of things. All we get to see are the papers and rumors from the periphery. I highly recommend the Nuclear Secrecy blog if you'd like to learn more! It's totally like being in a teenage clique that's playing a game of chinese whispers, with the added side bonus of nuclear weapons and global annihilation. Come for the clique, stay for the nuclear winter. http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/

If you enjoyed this article, the Restricted Data blog about nuclear secrets and allied issues is great: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/ Also recommended: The Nuclear Weapons FAQ by Carey Sublette (one of the foremost open source researchers about the actual workings of nuclear weapons -- much more on his site): http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html And Gregory Walker's Trinity Atomic Web Site: https://web.archive.org/web/20170606125046/http://www.abomb1.org/ (The last-updated version says "Trinity Atomic Web Site has moved to a new primary web server courtesy of the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture at Virginia Tech University." but apparently it's all just fallen offline since the last time I read it, sadly -- hence the archive.org link.)

Two great websites that you can learn more about the Cold War and Nuclear weapons are: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/ https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/

I took Professor Wellerstein's class it was super interesting. For my final project I researched some of the peaceful nuke ideas, and this Israeli canal was discussed in that class. The US had an entire program dedicated to a bunch of different applications of nuclear bombs that were not blowing up cities called Project Plowshare[1]. Some of the proposed ideas were the above second canal, another was a type of "fracking" to release natural gas, yet another was a way to create a new protected port (for military purposes) there was also a similar program in the USSR called Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy [2]. They had similar ideas, but the big achievement was closing two oil wells that could not be conventionally capped. so they detonated nuclear bombs adjacent to the well which physically blocked the well. I would highly recommend checking out Wellerstein's blog [3]. tons of cool write ups about different aspects of nuclear technology and their history. Another fun thing he made, the Nuke Map [4] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_National_Econ… [3]: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/ [4]: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

If you want advice on archives, you should just write to one of the historians who are experts on the Manhattan Project. The preeminent expert on nuclear weapons history is Alex Wellerstein, who also has a very well-regarded blog that comes up on HN from time to time: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/

> you cannot be too loose of a cannon at the top Meanwhile, in reality: “Are there any checks in place to keep the US President from starting a nuclear war?” What’s amazing about this question, really, is how seriously it misunderstands the logic of the US command and control system. It gets it exactly backwards. The entire point of the US command and control system is to guarantee that the President and only the President is capable of authorizing nuclear war whenever he needs to. It is about enabling the President’s power, not checking or restricting him. In a three part detailed longform: The President and the Bomb (2016) https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/11/18/the-president-and-the-bomb/ Part II https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/12/23/the-president-and-the-bomb-… Part III https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2017/04/10/president-bomb-iii/

https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/ - for anyone concerned that googling ‘nuclear secrecy’ might get them put on a list.

The Nuclear Secrecy Blog specializes in everything nuclear weapons: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/ The Atlantic Magazine has published some good pieces about the nuclear risks of the Ukraine…

"Gernot Zippe, an Austrian physicist, .. in the early 1950s figured out (with others) how to fix the problems that Beams had with his centrifuges. Amazingly, he did this while being a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union." http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/05/28/zippes-centrifuges/

This is my favourite: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2020/06/09/what-journalists-should-know…

Dr. Wellerstein, the book's author, has a great blog at http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/ where posts some informal write-ups and cool source finds. Some of my favorite posts: On the changing and unclear knowledge of Truman about how and where the bombs would be used: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2018/01/19/purely-military-target/ On information leakage through the very act of censorship: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/02/12/solzhenitsyn-smyth-report/ On the inherent human judgment and inconsistency of redaction, and the information leaks that creates: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/04/12/the-problem-of-redaction/ And lastly, some people here may also know him for NUKEMAP, a rough tool for estimating nuclear explosion effects (https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/)

Dissapointing that this text about a historical figure should end with the trope about the bomb ending the war before anyone invaded, when the historical consensus is that the best that can be said is that the bomb and the soviet entering the japanese theatre by invading manchuria had about equal importance. http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-use-the-bomb…

don't forget nuclear secrecy or the bulletin of atomic scientists: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/ https://thebulletin.org/

Because "the second most expensive weapons ever built" wasn't clickbaity enough? * The price of the Manhattan Project | Restricted Data || http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/05/17/the-price-of-the-manhattan-p… * The 10 Most Expensive Weapons in the World - 24/7 Wall St. || http://247wallst.com/special-report/2012/01/09/the-10-most-expensive-w… EDIT: Worth mentioning that we aren't done paying for WWII-era weapons. * America's Atomic Time Bomb: Hanford Nuclear Waste Still Poses Serious Risks - SPIEGEL ONLINE || http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/america-s-atomic-time-bomb-h…

This is a complete misunderstanding of US nuclear policy and weapons systems. It's designed to enable the president to launch missiles at any target as rapidly as possible, not to doublecheck or safeguard against him. http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/11/18/the-president-and-the-bomb/ You might say "sure, but there are people who have to actually execute those orders." But give the Pentagon some credit--those are people who have been systematically selected because they follow orders quickly and without question. For example, consider what happened to Harold Hering when it became obvious that he was not one of those people.

Follow-up analysis: "The blue flash" by Alex Wellerstein http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/05/23/the-blue-flash/

This is an excellent post that anyone thinking about Hiroshima should read. This post by the same author also makes a convincing argument that the beginning of the firebombing campaign against Japan with the bombing of Tokyo (in which more people died than at Hiroshima) was the unnoticed ethical turning point. http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/08/06/hiroshima-at-67-the-line-we-…

This is my favourite picture of the Davy Crockett: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/DavyCrockett…

> They're still there last time I checked. Hiroshima has a population of ~1m. Nagasaki closer to 300k. This is an argument by equivocation. There’s still a “World Trade Center” in NYC but it’s not the one that fell in 2001. Nor does saying it’s so restore the dead to life. > An invasion of Japan would have cost an order of magnitude more lives. It was the 4th year of an extremely bitter conflict that Japan started. There were no real good options on the table. Only "shit" and "extremely shit". This is a legal defense strategy that was never heard before an international tribunal because, notably, one was never held. I don’t have the energy to skim through the Nuremberg transcripts right now, but I also believe “it was the best of bad options” was a legal defense attempted there, with mixed results. EDIT: I’m being rate limited, so I can’t answer any more questions today. But suffice it to say that in Truman’s place I would have extended the relative protection that Kyoto received to every large Japanese city and contained the air force to bombing primarily military and industrial targets, with the understanding that precision bombing was not as advanced in 1940s as it is today. Here is a more in depth analysis of options other than nuclear bombardment (though it only discusses nukes, which is not the primary locus of my criticism). https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2015/08/03/were-there-alternatives-to-… Also I did not say they were “erased from the…

We're not prepared to countenance two things: 1) That some form of propellantless propulsion may in fact be 'a thing'. 2) That exotic propulsion technologies may be 'born secret' by default — even if you or I invented them — because of their national security implications (can be formed into an ICBM platforn). There would be no publicly-referenceable classification list informing you of this, because that is not how it works and would defeat the purpose. Our best precedent on this is in fact the Manhattan Project. Living then we would not know that isotope fission methods were restricted data, even while speculation could be bandied about in amateurish publications (cit. Alex Wellerstein's excellent blog https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/03/07/death-dust-1941/ ) Moreover, we would see those few scientists who were actually pursuing relevant study under government auspices actively misrepresenting (i.e. lying) to the press. cit. Urey on heavy water: "...it got Harold Urey, the guy who discovered heavy water, to write a letter to the editor saying I don’t have any clue what this is about. There is certainly no way to use this in war, which is a total lie." https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Full%20Transc…

The author is a historian whose main published work is the book Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States. He isn't very interested in the information itself; he's interested in where it comes from and in the process that led to its release. It's notable not because it contains interesting information, it's notable because it seems like it might represent a radical break with established patterns in US government procedures with regards to restricted data (which is a special and very weird kind of classification that only applies to nuclear secrets). In other words: the author is interested in the institutions and policies that manage nuclear secrets, not so much in the secrets themselves. In a different post[0] regarding a fumbled redaction that released similar information about what a warhead looks like, he had this to say: > It’s also just not clear that these kinds of [declassification] mistakes “matter,” in the sense of actually increasing the danger in the world, or to the United States. I’ve never come across a case where some kind of slip-up like this actually helped an aspiring nuclear weapons state, or helped our already-advanced adversaries. That’s just not how it works: there’s a lot more work that has to be done to make a working nuke than you can get out of a slip-up like this, and when it comes to getting secret information, the Russians and Chinese have already shown that even the “best” systems can be penetrated by various…

Hi, I'd like to make a few comments on von Neumann considering I've spent some time reading around about him. First of all, on the biography. So far for me the biographies written about von Neumann have two key problems to me: 1) They avoid his mathematical work and focus on his work in game theory, computing, nuclear weapons, etc. I find this a bit problematic because despite all his other achievements, von Neumann was fundamentally a mathematician who applied his skills in mathematics and logic to other fields to great success, however before all this he first made many substantial contributions to pure mathematics. Now the question is how can one author cover these broad areas that von Neumann contributed to at a reasonable level? I'm not really sure it can be done, even von Neumann's colleagues themselves weren't fully aware of the extent of his work. For example I remember reading some interview of one where they said he never made any contributions to number theory, yet von Neumann early in his career did publish at least two papers on the field, one on algebraic number theory and another on transcendental number theory. So perhaps multiple authors, each covering their specialty would work better if they can make their chapters weave together nicely. Another problem is what level should it be. I personally would like it to be around STEM major level mathematics so you can properly introduce some concepts however I understand most authors wouldn't do this because it…

The Manhattan Project wasn't focused on developing the atomic bombs just for dropping on the Japanese. The US was afraid of Germany developing a bomb first, and evidence presented here[0], at least, suggests several tactical and strategic reasons for choosing Japan over Germany (such as superior German air support, the perceived greater likelihood of Germany's imminent surrender versus Japan, and fears that Germany might better be able to reverse engineer a dud than the Japanese.) None of this suggests a primarily racially-motivated rationale. The evidence doesn't seem to support the premise that the US bombed Japan because they were Asians and didn't bomb Germany because they were Caucasians. Although, racism and xenophobia likely informed American public opinion of the bombings after the fact. There's no way to know how that would have played out had Germany been bombed, or both Germany and Japan. [0]http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/10/04/atomic-bomb-used-nazi-german…

I'm afraid that you have misunderstood the Bloomberg article. Nothing in it is about checking the power of the president (it says itself the president determines when to end the meetings and whether to ignore advice). It is all about verifying that The President has issued the order, and then ensuring that order is carried out. The President is contacted in this scenario simply because he's the only one who can actually authorize retaliation. He is enabled to do that independently, which is what the nuclear football is for. Alex Wellerstein is a academic researcher on the history of nuclear weapons, and he describes the situation thus: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/11/18/the-president-and-the-bomb/ """ >>Are there any checks in place to keep the US President from starting a nuclear war? What's amazing about this question, really, is how seriously it misunderstands the logic of the US command and control system. It gets it exactly backwards. The entire point of the US command and control system is to guarantee that the President and _only_ the President is capable of authorizing nuclear war whenever he needs to. It is about enabling the President's power, not checking or restricting him. """

As far as I can tell, Nixon was a complete nutjob. Here he is on the possibility of nuking Vietnam (via Alex Wellerstein): > But my favorite quotes are from Nixon about Vietnam. During a spring offensive by the North Vietnamese in 1972, Nixon told Kissinger: >> We’re going to do it. I’m going to destroy the goddamn country, believe me, I mean destroy it if necessary. And let me say, even the nuclear weapons if necessary. It isn’t necessary. But, you know, what I mean is, what shows you the extent to which I’m willing to go. By a nuclear weapon, I mean that we will bomb the living bejeezus out of North Vietnam and then if anybody interferes we will threaten the nuclear weapons. > A week later, he continued to a somewhat horrified Kissinger: >> Nixon: I’d rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that ready? >> Kissinger: That, I think, would just be too much. >> Nixon: A nuclear bomb, does that bother you?… I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christ’s sake! The only place where you and I disagree is with regard to the bombing. You’re so goddamned concerned about civilians, and I don’t give a damn. I don’t care. >> Kissinger: I’m concerned about the civilians because I don’t want the world to be mobilized against you as a butcher. http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/10/25/nixon-and-the-bomb/