welcome everyone delighted to be introducing our three speakers really terrific panel focused on alex wellerstein's new book restricted data. let me first introduce alex and then the others kathleen and matt in turn. alex wellerstein is a story of science and nuclear technology. he's a professor at the stevens institute of technology in hoboken, new jersey wasted a director of the science and technology studies of science and technology studies in the college of arts and letters his

first book restricted data the history of nuclear secrecy in the united states published as eric just mentioned just last month by the university of chicago. press is the first attempt at a comprehensive history of nuclear weapons. it's the first attempt at a comprehensive history of how nuclear weapons ushered in a new period of governmental and scientific secrecy in the united states his writings on the history of nuclear weapons have appeared in the new yorker the atlantic magazine harper's magazine the washington post and many other venues and this includes the wilson centers a number of events at alex has participated in as as part of our nuclear proliferation international history project. his online nuclear weapon effects simulator nuke map has been used by over 25 million people globally and is a

fantastic resource that we continue to congratulate alex on now we have something else to congratulate them on his new book and he'll be talking about it now for about 15-20 minutes or so alex floors yours. thank you so much. thank you christian eric the national history center. this is a great honor and i want to preemptively thank kathleen and matthew for agreeing to do this. this is really quite a lot of fun. i don't want to i'm not gonna give some long thing talk. but since i assume that most of the people on this webinar have not read the new book. i'm going to just briefly give an overview of this structure of the book and what it's about and then some of what i see as the major arguments of the book and then we can open it up more broadly to kathleen and matthew. the biggest argument of the book is that nuclear secrecy can be historicized that it has a

history that it is not some sort of natural or static condition that just sort of arose and then continued but it had a beginning and it has a lot of stuff going on and sort of determining whether it got made into a institution to begin with and it may not have an end. i don't know that's it's certainly has a structure to it. and so to that end the book is pure broken into three major parts. the first part goes from the self-censorship of scientists just before world war ii begins who are the ones who first have the possibility of nuclear weapons in mind after the discovery of nuclear fission this self-censorship through a variety of twists and turns morphs into a sort of civilian censorship, which is run by civilian scientific organizations, and then eventually becomes taken over by the worry as part of the manhattan project the wartime effort to build nuclear weapons and the manhattan project secrecy, of course is very vast

and is very famous. but one of the things that i think the book does a job of trying to emphasize is that most of the people involved in it thought that secrecy would be temporary and that it was not as absolute as they perhaps desired it to be it was perhaps impossible for it to be as absolute as they desired it to be and part one finishes by talking about the plans made to that were made by people within the manhattan project to release certain amounts of information about the bomb what they call publicity after the first use of the bomb, which was the first instance in which they had to very carefully manage what was going to be let out and what was going to be kept in and what criteria should be used to determine between the two part two of the book looks at what happens in these sort of post-war to cold war periods. so the bomb has been used war has did what now this follows debates within us policy over

the legal ramifications of nuclear weapons and their secrecy. it also looks at discussions that scientists including former manhattan project members had about whether or not secrecy was going to have a deadening effect on science whether or not it made any good political or strategic sense and whether there were alternatives such as the international control of atomic energy as a non-secretive approach to controlling nuclear weapons, and it covers the creation of the atomic energy act which is where the title of the book comes from restricted data is the legal category in the united states for nuclear weapons secrets, and it is a special legal category and a parallel secrecy system to the rest of american national defense secrecy. so for me, it's a very apt term to use both because it restricted data sounds to somebody doesn't know it. good term for secrecy, but also because this is one of the

strange and unusual hallmarks and again, very historicized the product very much of its times and i try to sort of show how those times produce this bizarre legal category, which is set up quite differently for many other sorts of secrecy. it goes on to can look at in attempts within the atomic energy commission to reform secrecy the people who were initially running the nuclear complex. we're not really big fans of secrecy, but they found that it was politically difficult for them to even from the inside change the fundamental operations of the system. these attempts at reform came to a sort of a jarring halt in 1949 and 1950 with the detonation of the first soviet atomic bomb the debate over whether to build the hydrogen bomb and the revelation in 1950 that the manhattan project had been penetrated by many soviet spies the this part of the book ends with the establishment of the sort of eis. era cold war approach to nuclear secrecy, which along with all the things that we would

associate with that mccarthyism fear of scientists. lots of fear of secrets getting out things like that fears of enemies both on the outside and on the inside of the united states nuclear complex also had the peculiarity of being very pro civilian nuclear power and so took on what i sometimes call a sort of bipolar approach of either nuclear information is so secret that you could be executed for giving it away or it is so beneficial to the public good that everybody should have it in the entire world part three looks at what happens with this cold war regime as the cold war sort of matures over the 60s 70s and even through the end of the cold war first by looking at challenges to this regime in the form of gas and refuses laser fusion and fears of nuclear terrorism. so these are incidences that the existing cold war framework for thinking about secrecy could not very well. all and adapt to and yet somehow modeled through nonetheless, and then it looks at the rise of

anti-secrety in the 1970s and eighties. so this is a sort of a philosophy a political ideology that says secrecy itself as the enemy in their antecedents of this even in the 40s, but by the 70s with the progress another, excuse me, the pentagon papers woodburnstein watergate this sort of turns into a political force in and of itself and it ends by looking at the progressive case and 1979, which is a sort of legal test of the restricted data clause that eventually more or less failed for the government to uphold this specialness. and then finally it looks a little bit at what happens at the end of the cold war where there are attempts to reform the secrecy once again that had some successes but ultimately the secrecy regime maintains its power and we still live within this essentially cold war state regime. so that's the sort of structure of the book. and the conclusion talks about some other things and hypotheticals and we can get into those if we want to the

bigger arguments or maybe the smaller arguments to the book other than the fact that nuclear secrecy has a history are things like the fact that nuclear secrecy was always controversial there was never a time period including during world war ii where everybody just was completely on board with the idea that secrecy was a valid way to try and control the proliferation of nuclear weapons and it always emerged from very specific historical circumstances. so it is again not natural it is not inevitable, but it's about specific historical forces and sometimes specific historical people operating at specific times and places and the book tries to you know, elaborate on what those are it also argues that secrecy really shouldn't just be seen as a binary of either sort of secrecy or non secrecy or secrecy and openness, but changing attitudes practices outcomes and including the idea that the release of information especially active release of information can be just as political and powerful and act and is one that is often you a

wielded by the sensors as well as the act of restricting information a lot of the book also argues that in the american context in particular nuclear secrecy is always intention with core national values cultural values governmental values and priorities. there's always attention there. it's what makes the united states such an interesting case for me for nuclear secrecy if we're talking about the soviet union, it would be really different story for talking about people's republic of china really different story. but because we're talking about the united states you have real tensions with the first amendment you have real tensions with expectations of transparency and open government and they this this these tensions produce really interesting historical i think of them as monsters but grindings and strange phenomena that are in some ways. i think unique to the american experience and lastly again nothing about the american secrecy system should be taken for granted as natural or obvious? it is entirely a product of

historical circumstances and often individual minds finally if i were just going to say what i found to be the most difficult and maybe intellectually interesting part about writing this book and sort of trying to tell the story. it was in finding a voice for the sensor. we don't usually think of the sensor as somebody who needs a voice because there are powerful person and we usually like to give voices to the voiceless and things like that, but ironically the censor doesn't usually get to tell their side of the story those of us who are on the outside of a secrecy system only see the the products of the censorship. we see the deletions. we see the pages denied. we see later the secrets that were held back, but we rarely can reconstruct the mind of the person who did it. we tend to come up with sort of stereotypes or evil villain tropes or you know, power hungry bureaucrats and in the book i try to really find these people and find their notes and see their handwriting and see debates that they were having behind the curtain of secrecy the same debates and

uncertainties that that were being held on the other side except that because they're behind the curtain of secrecy that secrecy kept those debates secret as well. and so ironically one of the conclusions i came about the history of secrecy. is that the voices of the critics of secrecy are the easiest to find they're everywhere. they're in newspapers. they're in op-eds. they're they're loud and and very angry but the voices of the defenders the internal defenders of secrecy, or at least the operators not necessarily to defenders. those are the ones that took a lot of historical on archival work to resurrect. so anyway, that's all i'm gonna say. thank you so much again. i really pleased to be here. thanks, alex. great. thanks for being so succent. we have two very distinguished scholars to launch us into our discussion that i hope will include many of you in the audience will start with dr. kathleen vogel dr. fogel's professor and deputy director at

the school of the for the future of innovation in society at arizona state university. a research focuses on socio-technical assessments of biosecurity threats the work has also studied knowledge production and weapons assessments in us intelligence and collaboration between academia and the intelligence community. previously she served as a william c foster fellow and as a jefferson science fellow at the us department of state and we at the wilson center are very proud to call her an alumna. she was with us as a fellow in 2011-2012. she holds a phd in biophysical chemistry from princeton university her publications or many publications include phantom menace or looming danger a new framework for assessing by a weapon threats published by johns hopkins in 2013 and several articles including into

disciplinary cross sector collaboration in the us intelligence community lessons learned from past and present efforts published in intelligence and national security in 2019. bringing the national security agency into the classroom. ethical reflections on academia intelligence agency partnership in science. engineering ethics and tech tacit knowledge secrecy and intelligence assessments sds interventions by two participant observers published in science technology and human values in 2018. it's wonderful to have you back so to speak kathleen the floor is all yours. thank you so much christian for that really nice introduction and it's also just such a pleasure to be here at this wilson center event. i've long followed alex's work with great interest and was so excited to hear about his new book coming out just to have this opportunity just to have a chance to read it when it's just a off the press.

and alex and i have a lot of synergies in terms of our shared research interests in the area of secrecy and national security and alex's book looks at the different secrecy regimes and practices around the american nuclear complex and a lot of my own work is christian. briefly mentioned has been interested in looking at the effects of secrecy on the on the american and soviet biological weapons programs. and so it was really interesting to read through his book to see some of the similarities but then also differences in terms of how these different weapons programs sort of handled and thought about secrecy and classification issues. so i found that fascinating i thought i'd do is just provide a few things that really jumped out at me as i read through alex's book, and then i'll definitely have interesting question to pose alex for conversation afterwards. so i think one of the great things about that alex's book does is to open up this black box of secrecy around the us nuclear program for looking at its origins all the way up to the present day and what i think has strength of this has a

historian is in this is to be able to get access to very unique archival and historical materials to really try and get at what structured secrecy and classification issues in the american nuclear complex and and looking at sort of the whole host of different actors that were involved in this but also looking at sort of the construction of different kinds of technologies sites institutions and different kinds of practices that had to be created to make the secrecy system work in in the real world. so, you know, he looks at sort of again things that we might take for practice for for granted those of us who might have followed sort of secrecy or intelligence intelligence issues things like those secret or top secret kind of stamps. those had to be added the you know, these whole things related to need to know policies how you do clearances and background checks on folks different kinds of physical security systems that you had to construct for

these technologies different issues around censorship and sort of how you might think through that. what needed to be censored and maybe what was left out. and then even things like enrolling far-flung pacific islands sort of all these things are critical to the us secrecy system around nuclear weapons. and what alex shows powerfully through his careful attention to detail with these this kind of historical analysis is that the past was not necessarily fixed and that there was not really one way to think about secrecy around nuclear weapons. rather what alex shows is that there are many different people inside and outside the government as well as different kinds of us government cultures that were having debates in this mix different circumstances different political factors and also different sets of enemies as well as allies that shape the secrecy regimes and practices around us nukes. and that these things were all very contingent. they fluctuated. they were contested and negotiated over time. and that you know as you read

through the different chapters of his book you see there are a lot of both contradictions and tensions inherent in these regimes and practices. i think alex also usefully shows how secrecy was also not only used to protect nuclear information. so it wasn't necessarily used as sort of a security practice, you know to prevent things from going to our enemies, but also sometimes for other reasons such as for managerial or organizational control employees essentially to keep them on task and focused on and serve the mission and the project and he also talks about another cases. it was to keep information from congressman that they would not scrutinize and question these huge budgetary expenditures for this new unproven weapon system back at the origins of the us nuclear program. and you know, he also very usefully shows that from the very beginning of the us nuclear program. there are various deliberations that emphasize the dangers of overclassification even while at the same time recognizing that we all needed secure some things

within the us nuclear program. there was always this tension of what was too much classification, and i think that's useful to think about and so what alex's book illustrates is that there was not really one way to think about the security of nuclear knowledge or nuclear weapons and even scientists working with inside the nuclear complex and contributing to this mission had very different opinions about what that should be and in covering this contingency. alex's book really asks us to think about, you know, possible alternative futures really help us to imagine how how might we have secured our nuclear weapons sort of in other ways and also it kind of brings this more contemporary sort of question how we might want to go about either reforming maybe or radically changing our ways of doing classification around these technologies or if we're thinking about other kinds of emerging technologies that we're concerned about how we might think about secrecy and classification around those things as well. his book also asks us to usefully consider what exactly is dangerous information or

dangerous knowledge. is it sort of things like the diagram for the h-bomb which he goes into a lot of detail in one of his chapters in his book? or sort of as dangerous information dangerous knowledge can more complicated than that for example does dangerous knowledge involve aspects of embodied knowledge what one might more commonly refer to as know how which is more difficult to acquire and transmit than through mere pieces of paper or digital means and i think the cloth spooks case that he talks about is what provides useful example around this and also that in the book's case alex or talks about how the russians didn't wholly trust this information that was being transmitted from folks because it was considered secret and so therefore could have been part of a double agent campaign to feed soviet misinformation. so again folks is passing of secret american nuclear information. i think alex's book sort of talks about doesn't didn't really ultimately accelerate the

soviet bomb program as much as people thought so i think again it's useful to kind of tease out and cover these interesting facets of american history. and so you know, how do we think about dangerous knowledge? what exactly does it take to design and actually build a workable or even a crude nuclear weapon how you answer that kind of question has far-reaching implications for not only how you might how we might secure our own nuclear weapons or nuclear complex. but also how we might go about trying to acquire intelligence about another countries or non-state actors nuclear ambitions, and i think alex's book does a great job in looking at the strokal record to try and sort of get at some of these very very difficult kinds of questions. alex's book also illustrates these fundamental tensions and how we think about, you know this need to control the diffusion of scientific and technological knowledge involved in producing weapons, and it gets at these kind of inherent questions about, you know, do we keep science open as much as

possible in order to basically enable better science for national security for economic progress for progress of american society in general or do we really need to clamp down on certain kinds of science and and control it in certain cases and you know, what might be the cost and detrimental effects in doing that. these are kind of similar tensions that i've seen in terms of my own work with developments and genetic engineering, you know, how there's the potential, you know to develop those technologies for all kinds of very beneficial medical advances, but the same time some of those advances could also create new and more lethal forms of biological weapons and and what you see, is that the logical my sciences community in the us national security establishment are still struggling to answer these fundamental kinds of questions about how much to keep science open and alex's book really helps open up this this whole it's sort of question of how we think about science and openness and how we might think about these more contemporary debates.

so that was just just a quick summary of some things that i found really fascinating about alice's book. what i want to do is kind of throw out just one question for you to kind of think about and we can come back to whenever it might be convenient. and it's sort of this issue of thinking about this long arc of the history of secrecy from the origins of the us nuclear program kind of to the present. you're booked as a really great job a sort of following that arc and that trajectory. and at least from you know, reading the book and sort of reflecting on it. it seemed to me that this history seems to suggest that although there might be challenges to secrecy regimes in the practices that you sort of describe in your book. that it seems like secrecy and classification always wins in the end and that little has changed since the end of the cold war. they're always seems to be kind of a new enemy that sort of justifies the existing security regime or intensifies it in some way and it gets to this issue of fear. which in one of your chapters you sort of talk about how the

origins of nuclear secrecy lay in fear. and so it's this fear that's this driver this motivator for these kinds of practices and these regimes so i guess my question to you is again after writing this book and kind of reflecting on this history. you know does secrecy always win in the end. you know, what would you say to that question and why or why not i'd be curious to hear your thoughts and kind of related to that. what would you say to the folks who are in the fight against secrecy who are really trying, you know for democracy for increasing transparency openness in american society who want to open that up? what would you say to those folks? is there a way out of this just dilemma and sort of through your book. what is your book kind of have to say about that issue so that i'm going to throw out that one question. i definitely have others that i'd be curious to ask, but i'll just kind of throw that one out there to start with. great alex, feel free to respond and we can go back and forth a

little bit if you'd like alex, that's great. thank you so much kathleen and your work has been very helpful for me. i'm glad that mine is helpful for you as well. but i do think that moving between the context of nuclear biological and i've looked a bit of computer science that it does help. you see what specific to the technology and what sort of a more generic epistemological situation. it's a really great question does secrecy always win. i think the answer doesn't have to be yes, but like with all things once you have a very large powerful infrastructure, it's very hard to undo it once you have a system. it's hard to undo real systemic change. and so there were i think instances say in the 1940s where you could imagine having set up a very different system. now these many decades on it's very hard to imagine a total dismantlement of that system without a dismantlement. of the overall systematic cases it and and so one of the i use

this line semi facetiously in the conclusion, but but because it's a riff off of another line that's famous. there's a famous quote which is it is hard to it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism, which is attributed to a lot of different people interestingly enough like there's no clear thing who said that but it's a very clever quote and so i say, you know in some ways it's easier to imagine the dismantlement of nuclear weapons that abolition of them than it is to imagine getting rid of nuclear secrecy and and that's because we build up our way of thinking and interacting with them around secrecy but to your your second question, which is maybe a more optimistic answer right to what do you say to reformers and it's don't try to dismantle the whole secrecy system. you probably won't be able to that would require a sort of real revolution and thinking on by a lot of people and it's not gonna happen likely anytime soon not without some major, you know, maybe end of the cold war you could imagine that people might have gone that direction, but would have had to have a

massive realignment of sort of powers, but there are ways to make things better in the world. and so my recommendation is always parse out specifically the practices that are the most harmful and the ones that you can actually imagine do taking issue with if the issue is, you know, really nasty background investigations change how those work if the issue is scientists can't publish on a certain topic you can sometimes get them to be able to publish on that topic that sort of stuff is possible and i was just thinking recently about how much the difference has been. there was a nice article in the new york times about police body cameras, and the real difference is between places that have laws that require them to be sort of instantly released to the public and the ones that it's a huge long difficult incredible hard way to get them released. that's a real systemic difference right that that level of secrecy versus output and i'm not saying which side of those one might want to fall on from a public. you know policy standpoint, but that's the kind of practice that maybe looks a lot smaller than

secrecy but is actually really core to the sort of lived affection day to day sort of interactions and so my recommendation to reformers is don't just rail against secrecy. that's fine. you can do that. it's it can be a powerful way to do it but focus on exactly what it is. that's the problem because not all of its as maybe urgent as other parts of it. great. thank you so much. so christian, i'll turn over to you. i know because we do have another panelist and questions probably from the audience. so i'll definitely come back later. but happy okay you very good. well then it's my this is actually perfect setup for our next commentator what alex has said matthew connelly who is a professor of international and global history at columbia. majesty co-director of the institute for social and economic research and policy and principal investigator of history lab and national science foundation funded project to

apply data science to the problem of preserving the public record and accelerating its release. his publications include a diplomatic revolution algeria's fight for independence and the origins of the post-cold war era which won five prizes including the george louie's bear price of the american historical association. and fatal misconception the struggle to control world population and economic economist and financial times book of the year, which she wrote at least in part at the wilson center if i recall correctly where he was a fellow in 2006-2007 his current book project to be published by random house is titled the declass education declassification engine. matt has written research articles in the announce of applied statistics comparative study in society in history international journal of middle

east studies the american historical review and past and present is also provided plenty of commentary on international affairs for the atlantic monthly the new york times washington is hosted documentaries for bbc radio matt. also, welcome back and welcome to the washington history seminar the zoom room is yours. thank you so much christian. part of this. i too have been following alex's work for some years now. i remember reading this dissertation and thinking this is one of the only dissertations i've ever read that i thought could have been published. as is with no further editing, which is really quite rare, but i'm very grateful. you know that alex continued to work at this immensely important and challenging subject because the book is even better. i mean, it's it's really quite amazing and it's a major accomplishment. i'm not unbiased here. i think this subject is

incredibly important, you know, i've been working at this for a few years myself. i hope members of the audience if they're part of this discussion. it's because they recognize that the fact that we only know, you know what the government will allow us to know about matters of great public import is is a critical problem, you know for constitutional and democratic governance of our society. i'm going to talk a little bit about the impact. it's had on historical scholarship because i think that matters to in the very long run even if you don't care about these things some people still care about things like nuclear proliferation. so in all these ways, i think alex's work is really profoundly important. i also want to say you know, and this is where we start to talk about the field of history to which he's contributing. this isn't just the first archivist history of nuclear secrecy as near as i can tell.

this is the first archive-based history of secrecy of state secrecy at least in the united states. i think that's astounding you know, after all, you know as alex shows the us government has been classifying and withholding information continuously now for about 80 years and the fact that we've had to wait 80 years before scholars start to study this subject in a rigorous way using primary sources i think is is nuts, but that being the case let's have at it. i'm going to say some critical things because i hope and expect actually that there's going to be i hope anyway, there's going to be a field of research now that many will be following an alex's footsteps, but first of all, like just to try to take a step back and put this in an even broader context now, i completely accept. i'm convinced by alex's argument about how it is a nuclear

secrecy has its own history and it's an profoundly important history just for secrecy more generally there are many ways in alex discusses them how it is that you know, we're not you know for the atomic bomb. it's hard to imagine that the current you know, secrecy regime that we live under would have taken the shape that it has so there are a number of important ways in which you know this particularly history really matters, but i'm going to show you just a few slides, you know in terms of what that means. that is the way in which the government reviews and then eventually releases or withholds information. i just want to show you some of the broader trends recent years, so i'm just going to share my screen. so to begin with i want to show you just some trends in in declassification. and so the first slide here is on the left. let me just put this in bigger form what you're seeing here on the left is as near as the

information security oversight office can estimate the total number of pages that were released through automatic and systematic declassification going back to 1979 and so in broad outline, i think you can see how there was a real boom, you know, and the the clinton years especially the years 96 97 98 and at that point there are over 200 million pages of documents being released each year and since then we've seen a veritable collapse, you know in the amount of information that's that's being released to the public now notice like the the high watermark, you know, 96 97 98 1998 was when the kyle lot amendment was passed. now this is not the only reason why we see such a decline in the number of pages being released to the public, but it's a very important factor. it only has a few sentences and alex's book curiously enough, but this was legislation that

required government officials if they thought that a collection of documents might have restricted data that they would have to review those pages one at a time page by page. so just imagine what that means, you know when you're talking about, you know, for instance with the state department and estimated two billion email a year, which is what we're looking at in recent years or for example, you know, send com or the coalition provisional authority. they have terabytes of email. they don't even know how many they have yet, but just imagine the logistical challenge of trying to review page by page that volume of information especially as we transition from paper to digital records. now it's a little hard to know, you know what this represents in terms of, you know, the larger universe of official records, but if you look on the right, you can see one particular set. these would be state department cables from the 1970s. so these are the cables that have been released to the public. it's showing you by

classification categories so in red you see secret and green is confidential and blue limited official user on classified and the y axis is showing you the percent of those cables that are withdrawn rather than being released to the public and so we're getting to the point the most recent release which by the way was four years ago. it used to be there releasing these almost annually. it's been four years since they released any of these cables and they haven't released any top secret cables through this program. so in the most recent year, you can see it's protein 50% but interestingly and this is where i'd point out. it's not just about state secrets interestingly. it's especially the category limited offic. start on classified records that are being with held at an even greater rate. the reason for that is most likely pii personally identifiable information. right, so it's not just kyle law. it's not just restricted data. it's also about increasingly stringent requirements for reviewing these records for the public which is a fact that's often missed in these kinds of discussions. so i'm not positing, you know a

unit causal explanation, you know for this but nonetheless, you know restricted data has a huge impact more generally in terms of what gets released to the public right up to the present day. so i'm going to show you just a couple more slides this on. the left is from alex's book. this is the d-classification process in 1946. i left out the caption, but he describes this as complex. it's complex. yes, but they're only nine boxes here. right look at the right. so this is from the public interest eclassification board. this is the body that's meant to represent the public all of us right and reviewing how it is a government decides what can be made available to the public and this many people think was their greatest achievement so far. because unfortunately as much as they've tried to change policy, they've had a relatively live in an impact, but they have shed a light into this process. and so this is showing you the process whereby documents get reviewed and in some cases

released to the public at the national de-classification center. the ndc was meant to streamline the declassification process. so this is a streamlined version this whole area here in the middle. this is all about whether these documents have restricted data. right so you can see how you know even when we're talking about state department cables or pentagon documents or what have you the the possibility of restricted presents a huge bottleneck. in the declassification of records, so it's it's as absurd as this, you know, you could have this is an anecdote the national security archive offers where even service records if somebody who fought in vietnam might get reviewed page by page on the off chance that they might have schematics or something else relevant for production of nuclear grade materials or nuclear weapons, right? so we just show you one or two more. so this is the official record of american foreign relations. this is from the state

department office of the historian and what you're seeing here in the y-axis is the number of years it takes before these records get released to the public. so in this case what we're finding is you're at pond year more it takes longer and longer for records to get released to the public. so we're getting now to the point where it's taking 40 years or more. some of these volumes took more than 50 years the most recent what's even more discouraging is the most recent year there were only a total of two volumes released in 2020. so here again, we see almost a collapse in the processes for reviewing and releasing records to the public now again, this is not all about restricted data, but rd is definitely a part of the story. this is what it means if you're in a historian and you want to study the history of american foreign relations, so this is obviously not the only source you have, you know people historians like me we believe in doing international multi archival history christian ostermann's group has been really important in making it possible for many more historians using the wilson digital archives to do multi

archival research and archives from countries around the world, but if you're interested in the official record of american foreign relations it now amounts us on 300,000 documents that have been released ever since the civil war, but what you can see is it takes not only longer and longer to see these documents. we have fewer and fewer of them. the last one the last graph. i want to show you is the impact. this has on the scholarship. so this is representing. it's a little bit complicated. so i'm gonna leave it up here while i keep talking but this is representing all the scholarship published in the leading journal in the field of american foreign relations. it's diplomatic history. so some of my colleagues and i what we did was we mined this textual data for the dates mentioned in these articles because we were interested in whether you know the period in which historian study my in some ways reflect the amount of records that are available for that study. and what we're finding is sure enough if you go back to the first years of this publication, which you're in the late 1970s, you know historians are mainly studying just world war ii and the early cold war and the years

that followed they started moving forward in time, but notice how in all this time now going on more than some 43 years. they've only moved ahead by about two decades, right? so the median here is 1941 going back to the first period the most recent period up to 2020. it's 1962. so i would argue that it's at least possible that historical research is stunted literally because the unavailability of sources made available through the us government in part in a significant to significant extent precisely because of the fact that they have not changed the d-classification system that alex describes dating all the way back to 1946 and this system is collapsing under the strain of born digital data. all right. so this has an impact right? it's important for historians and i think it should matter to everyone if we want to know. you know what it is. the government does in our name. um now it has, you know, lots of effects right the loss of

control of information the government generates. it's inability to protect that information to review it and release it to the public has had a number of consequences right? i'll just mention a couple just to remind us, you know, the hillary clinton email scandal i think to a great extent has to do with how it is at senior officials no longer trust the government to be able to manage and protect their information including their personal information and the fact that it took more than eight years our eight months rather to review this 30,000 batch of email is also reflection of the collapse of our system of declassification the fact that brett kavanaugh was confirmed without due diligence of the documents documentary record that he produces a public official here again is the fact that you know current systems are incapable of coping with the sheer volume of materials that are produced in a timely fashion. they're various reasons for this i would argue one of the main reasons is the gross underfunding of the national archives as much as public. those in our presidents talk about the need to balance right the requirements of secrecy with

the needs for openness and transparency. there is no balance. the the government now spends over 18 billion dollars a year protecting classified information the amount of money it devotes to declassification. is about a hundred million dollars. so it's about half of one percent. so there is absolutely no balance in terms of how this government has managed information and made available to the public. so these are really important things. i think it really matters in terms of democratic accountability what we can know about history and i congratulate alex and in this book he manages to be very dispassionate and even handed and judicious but -- alex. where's the outreach? i mean, where's the outrage the i feel like you bury the lead in this book? i mean you have to wait till the conclusion where alex says that you know for all of the secrecy extreme secrecy his educated judgment after 15 years working

on this is it probably didn't slow proliferation. it probably didn't even slow the rate at which other countries required nuclear weapons. right. i find that outrageous. i mean it's infuriating. you know that we've had these kinds of gross, you know consequences that go to the core of our, you know entire system of government and and what it is we can know about history itself for a policy that failed. right, so i find that outrageous and and alex. i hope you do too. even if you're just too judicious and maybe too smart politically in terms of who you want to convince here to fully vent your outreach, but i hope there's at least a little bit so i'm bothered right but let me just offer one other criticism if you don't mind and this is not unique to me. it's something kate brown writes about in her review in science. now she points out that you know having read this book you would think that it didn't matter. you know, i'm paraphrasing.

this is not exactly what she says, but you would think it didn't matter. you know that the people making these decisions where all of them men all of them white right now doesn't matter. now many of you might think, you know if you're coming to us from outside the academy and i think most you are that is this like another example of academic wokeness. you know, where are we now where we can't even talk about nuclear weapons right without people talking about gender and race etc. but actually i think it kind of does matter and so let me give you an example of what i had in mind and i want to thank kate brown, you know for pointing this out because it got me thinking a little bit harder than i might have otherwise so as alex describes the atomic energy act put the federal bureau of investigation in charge of deciding who is going to get access to restricted data. these guys right? so this is like a class portrait from the 1930s of men getting marksmanship training and they're all men. right so it wasn't until after

hoover died. he got rid of the two fbi agents who are women in 1924 as soon as he could and then he didn't allow another woman to become an fbi agent after he was dead. um, so he would talk and he actually and even and then in trying to justify this policy, he said that for him what was important was that fbi agents the dominant right that he imagined them in a man-to-man situation is having to overpower and intimidate whoever it was that they were dealing with now these were the guys you know, who were doing security investigations right now. it wasn't just that there were no women right again. they're overwhelmingly white the fbi's own historian can only come up with 15 agents who are not white and this entire history by 1946. there were thousands of fbi agents like doing eventually millions of security investigations. so these were the gatekeepers are restricted data now it's hard to demonstrate with data the difference that could have

made but i think there's good reasons to think it would have made a significant difference now first of all, you know a rest record even without conviction could be a factor in denying somebody's security clearance. obviously that would just before personally tax communities that are over police like just to take one example now i also have come across documents and some of the people have written on the history of black men and women on the american foreign service have given examples where people like john foster dulles, for example, let's say, you know as much as i might like to appoint a black person to the un delegation, they're just never going to get a security clearance, right? so sometimes this is a factory even in terms of who was not getting chosen particular jobs. not just like who didn't get those jobs because they couldn't get security clearances now alex references, you know how it is that sympathy for civil rights causes could be a red flag, right and the nwcp is we know is getting investigated throughout this period now, i think that probably matters right to some extent in terms of who these people are and who gets to wheel this incredible power that alex describes. one of the only studies i was

able to find where they actually tracked ethnic and racial discrimination in security clearances. comes from the department of energy interestingly enough from 1994 now why is that? why is it that only the department of energy after all these years in 1994 decides, this is something they should look at that. it was something they'd never looked at before and apparently the the people in this report say that they were surprised themselves when they found this. what do they find they found that clearances, you know for african-american americans hispanics american indians were suspended more often than would be statistically expected of the suspensions have been randomly distributed cross racial and ethnic groups. why is the department of energy why 1994 because i think because hazel o'leary is this energy secretary the first woman the first black woman to be secretary of energy. right, so alex to his credit, you know in the book. i think it's one of the only

times he points out, you know, whether anybody had any particular gender or any particular race. he points out that his old leary was the first woman the first black to be secretary of energy, and he said that you know, she looked different but again, it's not just that you look different right? i think it's about who she was and who her experience right that probably shaped her understanding of the problem that she confronted. i think these things mattered in terms of the fact that the part of energy for the first time, you know opened up the files for experimentation on human subjects. i think it mattered in terms of more generally how it is to do and in that period began to open their files and of course it matter in terms of how she was targeted right and eventually at least to some extent driven out of office allegedly because of the security breaches. we're asian americans allegedly. we're particularly threat. so this part of the history alex. i hope you would agree like it's also a part of the it also has to be explored and investigated and i don't expect you all to

have done done all of that in what is already a monumental and incredibly impressive book, but i hope anyway that there's a field of research now where many more will join with you in exploring the subject. so, thank you so much. thanks matt as we get back to the full screen for this very thoughtful and passionate commentary alex over to you for an initial response, and then we'll go to our longer or long list of people who would like to intervene as well. so alex. thank you so much, matt. i think you're you're bigger point that that the difficulty of writing this history is partially because the the subject matter is closed off and at least writing it. well, right. it's easy to write a one-sided history of secrecy from the outside, but that isn't going to there's going to be major limitations in that and that's

partially why i don't spend as much time on the 90s as i really wish i could in this book that in the publisher putting hard page count restrictions, but i do think it's really important. i think a lot is important but in the sort of way in which i see it, it's important. in it's sort of the book in its details is much shorter in the 90s because there's many i had some access to things that had once been official use only but had been released but anything that's still classified. it's not they're not going to release it anytime soon. so that put real limitations and i try to signal that in the book and say look there's only so much you can say after a certain point but and as your your chart shows, you know, the the richest material in the book covers from about 45 through the like late 70s. that's when that's where you have lots of stuff to go on and even the 80s are difficult. you can do some stuff from the outside from the 80s, but it's

very hard to do stuff from the inside. so that's definitely part of it and it's part of this book and i have to own up to that because that's part of the book, right? there's no way around that without access to more stuff. i think that in terms of your question though about like, where's the outrage? i don't know. i have an easy time my goal of doing this book is not to. it is the purdue something that could be useful for people performing and it is to make commentary on the value of the secrecy and things like that. but more of it it's been just trying to get inside the head of the people making the secrecy and i find that if you if i go into it with a strong view of looking for the bad guys and looking for the evil, you know that i end up writing a bad history. i'm fine to bury the lead i i to me writing something that is on the one hand somewhat sympathetic to what they think they're doing.

and then in the end concluding it was pointless is is not a bad history book. it's it's not going to the goal is not to get people to go out and do something. i'm more than happy people want to take the book and hold it up and say go out and do something. that's totally fine by me, but that's not what i see. my job is doing not at least for this book. i'm not an anti secrecy activists and i think that doesn't mean that i think secrecy is good, but i don't really constrain my can consider myself that way and i think that this book would have been very hard to write at least to write well as an anti-secrety activists and i say this with no disrespect whatsoever to answer secrecy activists some of whom are good friends of mine, but that isn't my particular are object so to speak and to the to the question of like does it matter? of course it matters, of course, it does and it matters not only that they're white and male which is omnipresence in the cold war but it matters that a

lot of them are scientists that colors how they view all sorts of matters and one of my biggest arguments is that the fact that the doe had been so physicist dominated in the atomic energy commission is one of the reasons that handel's secrecy, of course so poorly because physicists turn out to be experts in many things but not governmental operations and not you know that the complexity of practical systems and things like that. and yeah, you could imagine this book having a lot more there is some stuff on there on on the ways in which the these conversations are limited to certain number of people, but that's sort of the what a secrecy system is right. it's a deliberately a system of exclusion who's on the inside who's on the outside and it struck me sort of not it is a little obvious to say like guess what during most of the cold war it was white guys inside the nuclear weapon system like well, i mean, yeah, that's like like they this is a racist sexist

society and and especially on these areas where they were thinking there drawing the walls up as high as possible like nuclear weapons that were going to be extremely that way. they wouldn't even i guess as you point out they not only didn't tolerate minorities and women for the most part. they didn't tolerate people who had heretical ideas like you know at one point international control like this is lillianthal in particular david lillianthal ahead atomic energy commission was amazed that laden is tenure people being interested in international control a policy. he had triumphed to pushed we're now being seen as as like red flags for dangerous ideas, but that's how constricted it gets right. so i think the question of would it have mattered if it was different as is a little hard to answer because it's a historical you can't just take a bunch of women and minorities and plunk them into 1950s america high positions of government and like have any clue with that would look like the system that produce that would be different. i will point out though that

he's hilarious was definitely the first african-american woman. she was not the first woman though dixie lee ray in the 1970s under nixon was a female chairman of the atomic energy commission and as with all of these examples, huh, she gets a footnote. i know i know because she i know i i felt bad about that. she doesn't do that much on secrecy one way or the other and the problem with the book like this what was keeping it as you know from writing books within the scope every little part of it has to be about like what's changing the baseline and so dixie lee ray is a few other characters in there who just get like shoved into a footnote at best. yeah. this person was the head for two years. well, anyway, they were a lawyer moving on but they also just didn't do a whole they didn't what i would say make a big mark on the policy which is to say especially after the first three or four people in that role most of the people running the aac don't interested in reforming or

changing the system one way or the other they accept it as the status quo and they become as boring as most bureaucrats do and hazel o'leary is interesting because she's the only one after all that who actually totally bucks the system and changes things around and i do try to talk about why she's doing that and what what her motivating things are and i do think that makes a big difference. i don't think you get the openness initiative without hazel o'leary and being who she is being interested in what she is. she's not a sort of cold warrior the way that most of them were she isn't james schlesinger. she isn't, you know these types of people so i definitely think it matters. i think it makes a difference. but again, it's it's be nice to have written that book also that was kind of my feeling when i read kate brown's reviews. i thought well, it'd be nice to have written that i'd be at the different book and i hope somebody writes it because it's it even telling the old white guy version of the story which i admit that's what most of my people are enough and the sort

of broader especially the period again of the 90s to the present. that's something that i didn't do i can't do as well as i'd like to at least not with the methods i use the best approach to that that i know of is arcan and priests top secret america, which is a good book. most of it's 9/11 afterwards but is is you know, it's a work of sort of journalism and and that's sort of and it's limited by what it can access as well of course, but but that's what this was what i struggled with in doing the book as part of me that wanted to do a whole additional. you know would have would have wanted to really spend a lot more time on the lake cold war. especially the end of the cold war and in the end i thought well, this is probably about as good as i can make it do for this amount of space and with these sources, but i agree and i i share your optimism and hope that there will be a lot of other things that i hope that there will be a burgeoning field including people who will see my

book as the one that you need to respond to and show how wrong it is. that would be excellent. but but and i say in the introduction of the book this despite the title, i mean the title is the history of nuclear secrecy in the united states and my publisher said this is what we would like to subtitle to be and i bet you're gonna want to change it to a history of nuclear secrecy because that's how you historians always are and i was like, well, i mean intellectually speaking obviously, but i understand you've got to sell some books and that's a complication the title is gonna be what it is, so i would not actually represent it as the history, but it is a history and it's a start i think. but but anyway, i agree with i agree with these things. i'm also don't have a problem with people being outraged at all if you want to be outraged after reading the book, that's a in my opinion a 100% valid interpretation of the book though. that's not really i don't go into it for the outrage or whatever and again for me the heart it in a way. it's easier to be outraged. than it is to show that the

reason that it got into this situation isn't because of a lot of people conspiring it got into it in in part because some very well-intentioned people were trying to figure out their feel their way through this new world and these new ideas and then ended up getting themselves into systems that they couldn't undo themselves and to me the great irony of the book, especially the beginning the first part one and part two of the book. is that most of the people who end up setting up this system are effectively not fans of secrecy. they build this prison for themselves and then realize belatedly that they can't get out of it and some of them end up saying like lillianthal like well, we should just this bad just this bar the entire ac it's a terrible organization by the 60s and but by that point, it's too late. great. well, let's let's open it up. thanks alex for that response. and that was just a wonderful

exchange and matt and kathleen. please feel free to chime into the discussion with the audience as well. i think eric you had a quick initial question as well. i do. we've talked about big issues in our exchange now. in addition to the big issues. there are also some really quite excellent stories that as readers i think draw us into the issues and and the larger narrative that you're constructing. and you haven't talked given our time constraints about some of those really quite excellent stories. i'm wondering if you could just talk for just a moment or two about the progressive magazine case in 1979 in an effort to stop a leftist magazine from publishing. what government lawyers think are. highly problematic content yet.

the lawyers themselves disagree and come to question and challenge the fact that they're even bringing this case at all. and so maybe we could just say a few things about that and and how it touches these larger issues. we do have many people waiting. so alex olivari will succinct i will say that the book is mostly a little stories and narrative anecdotes. and and that's how i write and it's what i find fun about this and yeah, you lose that in this kind of discussion. i thought you were going to ask about a different story, but but i'll just mention briefly that as it came to mind as one of the places in the book where i do have some non-white people which is a bunch of indian scientists who sort of wander into the manhattan project and they're the fact that they are non-american and non-white does play a big deal a difference in how the security people interact with them, but i'll just throw that out there the progressive case is fascinating and i end up spending quite a lot of the book talking about it because it's just so much is going on. but basically it's a an anti-war anti-secrety activists named

howard moreland, and he decides that the way to take down the secrecy system and to be a powerful actor is to discover and then publish how an h-bomb is made and he goes about this in various ways. and i do and i think i know it in the book. maybe i don't but one of the amusing things is he takes this plan to a number of other anti-nuclear activists including many women and they say like, what is the site? what is your plan? you're gonna show people how to make an h bomb and somehow that's going to fix the secrecy system like this isn't how activism works and he is you know does it anyway and he takes it to a magazine the progressive and left-wing magazine as you'd imagine from the title, and they basically they agreed to publish it but they basically bait the government into trying to censor them and i think the baiting part is something that hadn't really been discussed than most histories of the progressive discussion that it's very deliberate. it's not the government being a big ogre as it gets depicted and like oh so, you know squash the progressive it's they sort of

through ways to describe. force the government into a very uncomfortable position where they decide they're going to try to use this law. they don't really expect the progressive to fight back. the progressive does fight back it ends up in court and then an appeals court and then in the course of this case, it becomes clear that the the government's approach to trying to censor this information is trying to censor information. that's really been out there for many years and in a little bits and pieces and all moorland really did it's sort of pull it together and i talked to some of the lawyers on the case and was also one of these instances where the version that became the sort of public version is mean government is dumb and wants the censor nice guy activists, but the reality was more like lawyers recognize very quickly. this is a bad case the attorney general. however, it made a promise to the president of the united states carter in order to prosecute it. they did not think that they

were being the bad guys. they thought they were being the good guys the nixon reforms and they thought how to make an h-bomb was a suitable benchmark for how dangerous the secret had to be before you could censor it and in the end the whole thing falls apart. i spend a lot of time on it in the in the book, but i'm pretty pleased with it as a bit of research not just because i got access to some of these people but it is one of these cases we're seeing both sides of it really lets you sort of figure out what's gone wrong here. is it that the government overreach is so large or is it that there's the systems of power that are moving around that are not always in communication with each other and then again, i don't want to call the progressive people bad faith actors, but they are sort of bad faith factors are able to take advantage of this system in a way that amplifies ironically uses secrecy to amplify their own voice considerably. all right. let's go to michael binder if you could please unmute yourself

and post introduce yourself briefly and ask your very brief question. sure. i was a doe reviewer for four years. i've been in air force reviewer for 16 years. i guess this question is more for professor connolly. do you want to have information declassified or records declassified sanitize because they're those are two very different things and you really have to make a choice as to which one we will focus on. yeah, that's a good point because if for instance performances measured quantitatively you create create perverse incentives. so just to take an example of the statistics i was showing about pages declassified the number i gave for the amount spent to protect government information. the most recent information is 2017 because the information security oversight office says that they no longer feel they can have confidence in the estimate provided by departments

and agencies about the number of pages certain classifying the number of secrets. they're producing each year and the amount of money they're spending on on secrecy. so in fact, you know, i wouldn't want you know to set up quantitative goals, you know for or even in terms of like time limitation, so when for instance, you know, we talk about automatic classification you're one of my concerns is that you know, if you say that a record has to be least, you know after x number of years you create an incentive potentially to destroy records right rather than release them. so to ask your question, we want the information right and if you know instead we're just looking at numbers of records, right or even how old those records are what we may get is a lot of direct, you know that nobody's interested in. so declassification policy, you know if i understand your question, you know should be informed by an understanding of

what it is the public needs to know. right more so than you know, we're going to declassified this many records say but we're failing on all fronts, by the way, whether it's about information or whether it's about numbers of records released. thank you, alex. i just might add to that that to me and this is one of the things that i really agree with you on matt that in terms of like what could be done number one thing that could be done is funding more and more of the there's that by law. they contain information in them. that should be out right that the act of d-classification is not actually deciding that something shouldn't be secret anymore. that's a separate system. it's going through records that already exist and deciding whether or not you can release them now and in principle, there's millions of records out there that by our current legal standards should be released and should have information out there and and the fact that

they're not is not again. i don't think it's because of shadowy cabals, but i do think it's because we don't fund this especially at national archives like it the backlogs nara are so bad that it's almost not worth filing fully a request at this point. it'll take you five years before they even review your requests practically and and so like to me the answer would be yes all of the above and please ten times more. can we please just dedicate a lot more funding to this and make that a bipartisan issue because that would free up a lot of the the that would rectif. lot of the ills when it comes to say being a historian even if i get a record and a bunch of the words are deleted i can still use that as a historian, but i don't have a record. i can't do anything. except. yes. thank you. let me call on toshi. higuchi. toshi hello, can you hear me? yes. yes. congratulations. i look forward to reading ubic i

have a question introduce yourself to actually real quickly. yeah, my name is toshi. higuchi from georgetown university. um, so i you might touch on this in your book, but i wonder if you can enlighten me a little bit about the transnational transfer and the learning of the american ideas and practices of nuclear secrecy and its impact on democracy around the world now. i'm thinking more about the british. here because the obviously that's a case like whitman's information was has been shared, but i'm also thinking about the japanese case, which is not really about nuclear secrecy, but more like a defense information provided by the united states that led to the crisising post what democracy because of the the increased the police power. thank you. thank you so much. toshi. it's good to hear from you. so the book talks a little bit about this but not as much as i would like to me. this is like would require

another book probably but there are some discussions about the us and the uk in particular because these are obviously very close. they're both very close in their nuclear programs and they also have some problems with with the uk being responsible for almost major spy in the manhattan project. and so there were several very tents years from the 40s and the 50s as this sort of relationship was getting reworked out again, and the us was trying to sort of make sure that the british standards were considered to be adequate to the us ones that really interesting case and i talk about it a little bit in the chapter that talks about guest interviews is trying to deal with the british the german and the dutch with regard to centrifuges and john krieger's work and bill burr's work as has looked at this a bit as well. and to me it's really interesting in a way we think. secrecy about is as being about our enemies, but it's often

about our allies and so is a lot of our nuclear policy, right? we need our allies to be enlisted with us on certain things and our allies are in some ways more tricky than her enemies because you know, you know what the soviets are going to do. it's pretty straightforward. right? whereas like, what are the dutch gonna do that's actually a pretty difficult question. and so the us tries to export certain secrecy rules and expectations to the netherlands regarding center fuses that we're not developed in the united states. they didn't get any restricted data from the united states, but they had been judged to have data that they think is somewhat sensitive and the dutch are very resistant about this and the dutch basically said we don't want to import a secrecy system. we don't really have one. we definitely don't want yours and also you're not the boss of us and this isn't your information. so why should you get to tell us and eventually the dutch agreed who sort of adopt some of these practices, but from what i can tell i'm not an expert on the dutch stuff, but even just from what i can tell about what you can research and side of things they definitely don't adopt them as strongly. i mean some of the copies i have

the copies of those secrecy agreements which are not declassified in the united states, but the dutch will release them to anybody and this is the kind of asymmetry that of course the historian can happily exploit, but it's also a sign that this really didn't work that well. so again, i think there's a lot more. i don't really know that much about the exporting of these things in the japanese case at all. and i think i would probably find the language difficulties impossible. so i'm hoping that somebody else can write that. i think you're still muted christian. i'm sorry. thanks. toshi. and alex we'll go to joyce rang and next joyce. please unmute yourself. yeah. now you're still you're still muted joyce.

you should be prompted to unmute yourself. and we get this fixed now then maybe we'll try. tried back later and go to jeffrey gruber. hello. hi. yes. hi. we can hear you listen to this yourself. and you question now. i'm at king's college london, right? so hello from the future. it's 10 pm here. kathleen brought up a really interesting point that i learned from alex's book about the driving fears and motivation for secrecy in the manhattan project. which was that congress was really the most likely to shut down the project and i found it interesting when truman later on

in april 1945 when roosevelt died. he beforehand as a senator was really trying to study the project and he was always thwarted but then afterwards and when he finally was led in on the secret his reaction. was that quotes. he he understood now perfectly why he was thwarted. so my question is considering truman's reaction. was it a reasonable or valid fear of congress? yeah, i think so. the argument in the book is right that one of the major targets of the secrecy during the world war ii period was keeping the american congress in the dark not so much because the american congress is full of bad people but because they leak all the time and they might not be able to accept that. this project was a good idea and they could actually shut it down. whereas say the germans or the soviets or the japanese would not be able to and i think yeah, i think it's a actually totally

valid fear congress leaks information all the time. they do it during the cold war. they do it during world war ii. there's very little few means by which to punish congressmen who leaks information so they don't have a lot of disincentives to do it truman himself. and i talked about this a little bit in the book. i mean he tried as a senator to audit the project and he did in fact get a little bit of information on it, and he we know this because he wrote to a judge shortly after he was told not to look that they were building some kind of explosive out at hanford. and so somebody leaked to truman some kind of information about it. and of course he did exactly what people feared that he might do which is he immediately leaks it to a civilian, right? haley tells passes that information along and open mail to somebody who has no connection. so i i do think and and let me just say that just because i think that they had valid reasons for doing it. it doesn't make it a good thing.

i think that at some level the manhattan project is a fundamentally anti-democratic approach and i think that secrecy especially on that level is fundamentally at odds with democracy and the tricky thing to do is to reconcile, you know, okay, maybe you it's fundamentally anti-democracy, but is there other way that they could have made the bomb during world war? too and i don't think so. and so to me, this is one of those things. it doesn't necessarily mean it's a good thing at all, but i think about this every time i hear somebody saying we need a new manhattan project for x our new manhattan project for y you really don't want a lot of organizations like the manhattan project. they're very bad for democracy. and if that's your only option of being totally secretive and ramming a program through is the only possibility with no oversight. okay. maybe you need that to survive. okay, but you should be really hesitant to go down that path. don't call for a new manhattan project professor internet. it's not worth it. thank you alex on the manhattan project. john cloud is wrote in a question. your research is as usual spot

on he writes, but did the secrecy protocols really begin at the beginning of the manhattan project or that the protocols borrow and absorb pre-existing protocols from industrial secrecy particularly large scale industrial chemistry and munitions and many other weapons system between the wars. yeah. it's a great question and with anything historical you can always find an antecedent. there's nothing new under the sun in the us you do have some technical secrecy during world war. i really don't have a lot before world war i and that to me is quite interesting secrecy and on the scale that we think of it is mostly a 20th century creation world war. i sort of beginnings of that with the espionage act and some other laws that are passed around this time and fears of submarines and gas warfare it's on a much more partial scale. it's is large and they end most of it after the war ends. that's the sort of big difference between world war one and world war ii. is that most of that world war i

secrecy is sort of rolled back immediately and is what many of the participants in world war ii thought was going to happen. but yeah, there is a there are some antecedence there and it's not a coincidence that some of the people who end up being very important for the establishment of the secrecy of the manhattan project have ties to that world. so james conant who was a major he was a president of harvard a major scientific administrator during war played a big role in suggesting how secrecy ought to work in the sort of civilian secrecy phase of the bomb work. he had during world war i worked at a top secret factory to develop top secret didn't exist then but a secret factor tree to develop a chemical weapons that we're never used by the united states because the war ended before they were ready they dump them off the coast of baltimore as one does but to me, it's not a students that people from that era the sort of world war i experience of secrecy and defense work. they become the powerful people in the beginning of world war ii and they're the ones who start

really setting up this system of compartmentalization and isolated sites and security clearances and things like that. they're borrowing it. what happens during world war ii, is that all that gets amplified to a much larger level than it was in world war one many many more people are absorbed by the secrecy and then it doesn't go away at the end of thank you. we're quickly running out of time here. let's call in a couple more folks steven schwartz. please unmute yourself and introduce yourself just because all right. thank you. hi alex. i kathleen steven schwartz non-resident senior fellow at the bulletin of the atomic scientists alex. what would you say? i mean you've been delving into this field for? on it feels like decades. i'm sure a long time. what do you think is the most egregious misuse of nuclear secrecy that you've uncovered both, you know in the prelude to this book and then actually putting the book officially

together. how did the government officials justify it? and what where it's immediate and long-term impacts on the us nuclear weapons program the course of the cold war and american society. it's a really hard question to answer stephen, but i thank you for asking it if i was going to say real misuse not just there's uses of secrecy that maybe they had bad effects, but you could see them as being valid like the sizes of the stockpile right which that had huge impacts on how americans thought about nuclear weapons that were vastly out of sync at times from the reality of the situation, but you could see why they wanted to keep that secret right? i wouldn't necessarily call that a misuse. it's a use but if i was gonna say real misuse in terms of it didn't really get that much and it really was inappropriate. i think that the easiest one the name and it has the interest most interesting story is the plutonium experiments. so this was work that was done during world war ii the goal was to figure out how plutonium whether it's you know, it's a

toxic radioactive substance how it interacted with the human body so they could establish safety tolerances for the plants and the fact that they did it. under secrecy and without informed consent, that's bad enough though. you can see why they did the research. that's not the way you're supposed to do research, but you can see why they did it. it's and and as far as we can tell nobody was injured by it the amounts of plutonium were not very large, but it's still totally totally unethical way of going about the research, but the secrecy of it that's interesting is is the post-war secrecy. so when the atomic energy this was done by the manhattan project when the atomic energy commission came into power they learned about this and this was taking the david lillianthal and they said should we release this? this isn't there's no national security reason to keep this under wraps. it's just very distasteful and as they said it it seems a little nurembergy right? it's not appropriate and lillianthal no fan of secrecy at all. so myself as a reformer said we better keep it secret and the

reasoning was that if you made that sort of misuse of activities public that this would be used as a weapon against the atomic energy commission that it's polit. enemies would not just differentiate between work that had been done under the army and the manhattan project and by the civilian atomic energy commission and at that moment the atomic energy commission was politically very weak and lillianthal feared not totally incorrectly that if there was a major scandal like this, it could be used as a way to disband civilian control of nuclear weapons and production and that would lead to a whole terrible apocalyptic situation. he didn't want and so he this was kept secret until the 1990s when it got released as part of the openness initiative and had you know major impacts on how people felt about whether they could trust the government and the deal it had scandalous problems even in the 90s when it came out because it's that bad of a thing and i like it as an example because it is a terrible misuse of secrecy.

it's not done again because the people doing it are these sort of evil people it's because they're real people in a in a mixed up terrible world and i can understand that and my favorite thing about lillianthal and reason one. i spend a lot of time on him in the book. is he so flawed? he's so human. he really wants to do the right thing, but he finds it because of his context almost impossible to do so and to me that's a reflection on the human condition in important way. thank you, alex. question that came through the chat patricia mcmahon is asking about research materials you use particular she writes and curious about the existence of the underlying documentation for the secret intelligence reports that might have survived in his housed in archives and thinking about the card catalogs of information or even surveillance records. have you seen any of this underlying source material and where might it be found if it still exists?

comic answer, please. yeah, i don't know 100% about the record you're talking about but in general lots of archival work lots of national archives sometimes having to do things that are rather clever with the finding aids like finding collections that they didn't make a finding aid for but they did create a listing of where the boxes are and just requesting boxes blind some freedom of information. act requests some mandatory classification requests one of the reasons this book took a long time to write and this relates to matthew's criticisms of the current system as well. is that none of these systems are quick. they're very slow and you can get things out of them if you're willing to wait five ten years to do it and fortunately some of these requests i put in a million years ago did come to pass and allow me to write some of these sections that are in the book about things that were otherwise would have been impossible to sort of tell the story of so in the back of the book an extensive notes and if you're looking for specific research you or anyone else the

advice i you're more than welcome to email me and i can tell you what i have and don't have one of the things that i do i think fairly well and there are some historians who are doing things like this now in matthew is one of the people who's sort of at the cutting edge of this but is using computers to help improve our speed and these things and not just taking all the notes on index cards in the ways of your and one of the things that i have for my own work is i have lots of finding age digitized including ones that are you know paper only lots of databases things like that. so if anybody is got pressing questions, feel free to send them my way. i'll tell you anything i've got because i just can't stop talking. great. thank you. ervin binder has been patiently waiting hilde our last question for you. please unmute yourself short introduction and question and then an even shorter answer from alex. all right. i'm a doctor binder. i worked in the department of energy for quite a number of

years doing document reviews, and i do have a number of things. i'd like to follow up with but in particular i happen to disagree with your emphasis on secrecy because in my work undocument reviews it was as important for me to release documents as it was to protect documents and i challenged many of the people from whom i was doing document reviews. why do we need to protect this i think rather than talking about secrecy you should be talking about information control and i often or there were a number of times where i said, you know, we don't need to protect this anymore. this is already either obvious or we've already released this information. so this particular rule to classify it. we don't need it anymore. think you're overreaching when you put the emphasis only on secrecy and not on the work that

we also did in parallel to make information available to the citizens of the united states. thank you very much. alex. you will be so pleased irwin because chapter 5 is all about information control and where that concept comes from and how it works and i just want to emphasize that the book is about both restriction and about release and this is what i mean by sort of restoring some of the views of the sensor from the outside the sensor looks like someone who merely crosses things out on the inside. there are people as you speak who are trying to put things out and and trying to release and especially within the early atomic energy commission. this is the cardinal debate. how much do you try to hold back? how much do you have to release? what are the pros and cons of each of them and i would say that the one the one caveat i would put to me fully agreeing with you. is that where that emphasis is release versus retention that very historically and there are times in this history in which

the emphasis is on put out as much as you can the 90s are a key time the early 70s are a key time for this and then there are times. and and you know matthew was pointed out the kyle lott is one of those examples the late 90s the sort of later 70s. were it flips back the other direction and there's a lot and there's reasons for why it flips beyond people changing their mind on what secret but political incentives and in general. it's easy to get punished for releasing too much information, but you'll never get punished for holding too much back. so i agree with you. it's both sides of the story in the book has both of these things in it it tries to actually argue that they are two sides of the same coin as opposed to sort of polar opposites. thank you. well with apologies to those who we did not have time to call o's

next panel moderate this panel session between our three scholars. i wanted to tell you