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Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for having me.
And so what is your area of specialty?
I'm a historian of science, which means that in the way that somebody who might be a historian
of America would study the history of, say, the country of the United States or a historian
of Europe would study the history of Europe, I study the history of science and technology.
So it goes across borders, it goes across time periods, it's not your everyday field
of history, most people don't know about it, but it's extremely fun because you get
to look at all sorts of different ways in which science and technology has impacted
human society over the ages.
And one of the areas that you specialize in is nuclear weapons and nuclear secrecy.
So can you talk a little bit about that?
My specific area is the history of nuclear weapons, nuclear secrecy.
Nuclear secrecy is the attempts to control knowledge as a means of controlling the spread
of technology.
And today in our modern society we take secrecy for granted, of course there's a lot of secrecy,
of course the government doesn't tell you everything, of course if something is dangerous
knowledge about it should be controlled, but interestingly it's relatively recent that
we have this kind of secrecy, basically the 20th century, the kind of secrecy that we
live in today did not really exist until World War II, so within living memory.
And the choice to try and control technology, to control a weapon, to control something
that you can build with your hands or have blueprints, the choice to use knowledge as
the, what we'd call the vector, as the means of controlling it, that's very unintuitive
in many ways.
The scientists who built the bomb did not think secrecy was going to be the way they
controlled it.
They had other schemes in mind, but we went down a very different path in the 1940s and
so I like to look at and explore this path and also make it seem less natural to us today,
even though that's the path we're still on.
Can you give us some examples of some of the secrecy regarding nuclear weapons today?
Today there's a lot of things secret about nuclear weapons, still some of it has specific
designs for how they work, so some of those design concepts for the early bombs are not
secret anymore, you can look them up, go on Wikipedia and find them.
Some of them, the details, even the substances inside the weapons are completely classified,
so we know that there's a substance inside modern nuclear weapons, modern American nuclear
weapons, but all we know is it's codename, it's codename is Fog Bank, very evocative
and it's so secret that in the early 2000s the government scientists decided they were
going to have to recreate it, that the old stuff that was in the weapons would need to
be remade and they realized they didn't know how to make it anymore, they actually kept
it secret from themselves, they had not preserved enough information about it and they had to
spend quite a lot of money building up a new version of the same old substance, and so
we can talk about that there was a substance, that they forgot how it was made, what is
the substance, that's still secret with their speculation, but we don't know what it is,
we don't know what it does, but we just know that it's something that's inside the bomb,
so there's a lot of different levels of secrecy from the very technical details up to questions
like where are all of our nuclear weapons?
We have some that we store in Europe, where exactly?
That's technically secret even though we have pretty good ideas about where they are.
How many nuclear weapons we have used to be secret?
We had pretty good guesses as to what it was and in 2010 the Obama administration said
here's the number, it's 5,000 something and said that that was no longer a secret anymore
even though that used to be considered one of the most closely kept secrets and so the
line between what is secret and what isn't secret shifts quite a bit over time and even
in our present day.
It could be argued that something such as how to build a bomb would be okay to keep
secret, but what elements do you think threaten democracy by being secret?
Even with something like how to build a bomb, there's a lot of overlap there between how
to run a nuclear reactor, so with the science and technology it's not always clear that
you can put the dangerous stuff into one box and say, this is very secret, nobody should
have access to this.
There's some things that are published abroad by people in other countries, should they
still be secret in this country and just to point out when we make something secret we
mean that if you publish about it or talk about it, you can go to jail.
So there's big stakes, it's not just holding it together, it's not just the government
saying I'm not going to tell you this thing, it's consequences for people who want to work
in these areas of science and technology or talk about them even with journalists.
As for the effects on democracy, if people don't know what we're doing with our nuclear
weapons, what are they aimed at?
Are they aimed at cities or are they aimed at military bases?
Under what conditions would do we think we would use a nuclear weapon or would we not?
If we don't know that sort of thing, it means we're entrusting all those decisions to people
at the very top of the governmental pyramid and who are those people, some of them might
be people we'd imagine like the president, some of them might be people in the military,
some of them might be people at agencies that most people don't even know exist.
So there's a direct conflict between sort of the democratic ideal of an informed public,
of a public that's taking part in decisions and electing people who it thinks are going
to make certain decisions over others and secrecy.
If you talk to government representatives they will say we acknowledge this completely,
there's always going to be a trade-off between sort of open discussion and the needs of security.
The problem I think that has become really evident is that as people on the outside
of the secrecy system, we don't know where the people on the inside are claiming that
trade-off is taking place.
We don't know where they're going to draw the line.
And if we don't know what their criteria is even for drawing that line, then it's very
hard for us to have any kind of participation in questions that go from either the bomb,
you know, they're driving the bombs near our towns, is that safe?
We don't know, we can't ask that question.
We can't ask questions about whether they're tapping our phone calls or monitoring our internet
usage if we don't know that they've decided that that's part of something that they need
to do for our security.
So there is a hampering effect, there always will be.
It doesn't mean that the answer is get rid of all secrecy, though it does mean I think
that we put so much trust in a couple of these institutions that have almost nobody checking
what they're doing.
You have a wonderful blog that attempts to bring the public into this whole idea.
Can you talk about your blog a little bit?
So my blog, Restricted Data, the Nuclear Secrecy Blog is, I've been running it now for about
four years or so.
It is very popular.
It's gotten more popular.
Yeah, for the work of a professor, usually in academic, our articles take years to write
and are seen by a couple dozen people and are written in a very jargon-y, hard to access
fashion.
The blog is seen at the moment on a regular day, about 2,000 people a day.
And why do you think that is?
There's a lot of interest in nuclear history.
I try to write about it in a way that will be interesting to people who don't know too
much about it, but also people who know quite a bit and are already interested.
So the blog is a place where I talk about research questions.
It's a place where I talk about sort of big questions sometimes.
It's a place where I like to ask little questions and see if I can come up with an answer.
So one of the ones I did, exactly at what point did the American scientists know that
there was no Nazi atomic bomb, because the justification for the American Manhattan Project
to build the atomic bomb was Hitler was going to get a bomb, but at some point, we realized
that Hitler wasn't going to get a bomb.
And so by the end of the war, we knew that their program hadn't gone anywhere.
So at what point did they know that, and did it change anything that we did?
And it turns out that's a very complicated question, because they had indications that
there wasn't a bomb, but they didn't 100% know there wasn't a bomb.
And so this is a place to talk about what kind of sources we have, what kind of information
the Americans had on the German program.
But it's also a place to talk about how the term know, do they know something, that this
isn't just a state of yes or no.
Sometimes you kind of suspect, but have reasons to doubt your knowledge, or sometimes you
might have some evidence, but think that you might be missing the key evidence, that knowledge
itself is a sort of slippery concept at times.
And so this is the sort of thing I like to do on the blog, where we have a very specific
historical question, and we have some documents, and I always post the documents, because I
want people to see what is the stuff that history is made of, and you can go on there
and read the documents yourself and see how messy they are, and they say top secret and
they have things crossed out.
It's fun to read these old documents.
But I also want to poke at it in a way that a sort of a professional historian does, which
is to ask these sort of deeper, almost philosophical questions about what do we mean when we say
when did they know, do we mean when did they have confidence that their intelligence was
100% accurate, when they didn't have any more doubt about a German bomb, and that's
a very slippery, as we know in our day to day lives, life doesn't always come down to
such a simple yes, no state of things.
And clearly probably today the same issues are going on.
You also had a very interesting article about Oppenheimer as being a kind of confused soul
and his identity was not clear.
What are some of your visions or ideas about Oppenheimer?
So J. Robin Oppenheimer, the so-called father of the atomic bomb, the lead scientist on
the Manhattan Project, really interesting character, lots of biographies about him,
a lot of people like to quote him.
He's interesting because most people get him quite wrong.
We like to fit historical characters, historians like to call them historical actors, which
is I think appropriate, into a narrative.
It's almost like a play, and we like to have things that go rise and fall.
We like to have heroes who bite off more than they can chew.
We like to have villains, but real life is full of really complicated, conflicted people.
The people we know in our lives are not all good or not all bad.
They're not always consistent.
So Oppenheimer is extremely inconsistent over the course of his life.
Sometimes he seems to be almost the conscience of the people working on the bombs, and at
the same time he can turn around and recommend that they drop the bombs on cities, which
is what he did during the war.
Sometimes he looks like he regrets having made the bombs, and then he'll turn around
and say, I didn't regret a thing.
He can look like somebody who pushes back against the military, and then you go into
the files and you found that he ratted out every single one of his friends and even his
family members to the FBI and caused them a huge amount of grief.
And so I like him because he's a real human being.
He's got all those complexities, and the more I look into what's motivating him, it's this
very complex psychology.
It's a guy who wants to belong.
And his whole life, if you read it through this lens, he always wants to belong in a
place where people are not always sure that they want him.
And this leads him to do things like cozy up to the military, even though they are very
antagonistic to his worldview, but he wants to belong there and be important.
So we view him as a very simple, sometimes a pacifist.
He's not a pacifist.
We view him as a martyr.
He would not have seen himself as a martyr at all.
So just to bring it around to your question about the nuclear disarmament movement, we
have a lot of narratives going on here.
We always like to see ourselves in some sort of trajectory and to think that everything,
all the issues in the world boil down very simply from a historical point of view when
you're really trying to go back and look at things as they are, not something that would
fit whatever my current day politics are.
You find messiness everywhere.
You find people who don't know the future.
You find people who don't know the right answer.
In some ways, it's disappointing because we don't get that nice, clean narrative that
we like to tell.
We don't get that good rise and fall story or that constantly overcoming obstacles and
being superior story than one of the few classic human narrative tropes.
But on the other hand, we also see people who look like real human beings and see people
that we recognize, oh, that reminds me of Uncle So and So and his conflictions and things
like that.
So I think that's a good trade-off.
Today, I would say that we also don't associate secrecy and also psychological challenges of
those who have nuclear weapons with nuclear weapons, but clearly that applies today as
well.
Now, on your blog, you've got a wonderful tool.
We've got many wonderful tools, but you've also got NukeMap that helps people today actually
envision what this thing is.
And so can you talk a little bit about that?
Sure.
So one of the problems with nuclear weapons is that, fortunately, we don't encounter
their explosive power on a day-to-day basis.
Fortunately, they are in what we call a realm of energy that is not part of our day-to-day
human experience.
And that's a good thing.
We don't want to live in a world in which that is part of our day-to-day human experience.
But it can make it very hard to wrap ones head around these things.
So lots of people have seen pictures of nuclear bombs going off or film of them going off,
but it can be very hard to get a sense of scale.
Most of our nuclear bomb tests are in the middle of a desert or on an island in the
middle of the ocean, not a city for obvious reasons.
So I created the NukeMap as a way for people to help them visualize this, to visualize
the destructive power.
What would happen if a bomb went off over my city or near my city or over somebody else's
city?
Whatever you want to do, you pick the options.
You can pick the type of bomb.
You can have it be the very first nuclear bomb, which they call the gadget, 1945.
Yeah, this scroll-down thing, you pick your bomb.
You pick your bomb.
You could pick a bomb that's the biggest bomb that the Americans ever made, the biggest
bomb the Soviets ever made.
You could pick a bomb from the current Chinese arsenal.
You could pick a bomb that the U.S. government says is the kind of thing a terrorist might
use.
You can pick the very smallest bomb we made, the little, tiny, Davy Crockett bomb, which
is about, you know, yay big.
So you pick your bomb.
You pick your bomb.
You pick your city.
You pick your city, and you click detonate.
And there's other options you can pick as well.
And it'll show you a series of rings, and they will say this is the size of a fireball.
Anything inside this fireball would be, you know, obliterated.
Here's a pressure ring for very high amount of pressure, 20 pounds per square inch, which
the caption tells you that's enough to destroy pretty much any building.
Some military bunkers can withstand that, but a skyscraper building, a commercial building,
an industrial building destroyed.
Even if it's standing, it's gutted.
Five pounds per square inch, it destroys houses.
So five pounds per square inch of pressure will knock down a wooden structure.
There's a line for radiation, where if you survive everything else, you'll get radiation
sickness and die in a couple of weeks very pleasantly, and there's a line that shows
you the range of third degree burns, which was, you know, burns that'll burn through
your skin down to the nerves, cause you disfigurement, and maybe even being fatal.
You can also pick other options.
You can have a tell you number of casualties and fatalities.
You can have a tell you whether there would be a lot of radiation blowing downwind and
what approximately the size of the contamination would be.
And again, the goal here is to help people visualize it and let people, and I hesitate
to use the word, but play a little bit, right?
Because we have a lot of research that says if people get to choose their own parameters
and learning about something, they learn it deep.
It's different than if I just tell you, oh yes, this is what would happen.
But if you've learned something because you chose all of the variables, people then come
away and say, oh yeah, a Hiroshima-sized bomb kind of would punch out the downtown of a
city like New York or any major metropolitan area.
But a big thermonuclear weapon would destroy the whole metropolitan area.
And those little bombs, they don't really destroy a whole lot, but they could be used
to attack tanks or troops or things like that.
So my understanding is that NukeMap has grown organically really quickly.
Yes, it's extremely popular.
So some 10 million or more people have used it since I created it.
And if you look at the graph of usage over time, what you get are these little spikes
from it being featured in news media or it'll be on social media in some big way.
And then after that, you get what they call in the industry the long tail.
So it goes up and it kind of goes out, out, out.
But what's really interesting about NukeMap is each of those long declines of usage is
higher than the one previous to it and then leads to another spike.
So overall, there's more people using it average per day now, way more than when it
first came out or even during some of the times of its highest amounts of publicity.
It gets a lot of just people every day.
At the moment, it's around 18,000 people a day are going on and often they're just
finding it through Google where they just know the link, they're not getting it from
a newspaper or anything and going on and experimenting with it.
So may I ask you, I think that video games, for example, have really desensitized us and
we just like to see things blow up.
So to what extent do you think people are going there for some kind of learning deep
experience or to what extent they just want to see New York blow up?
I keep track of what people do with the tool and I have two types of usage that I bracket
out.
One is what I call experiential.
So this is you're blowing up yourself.
You're blowing up spaces that you know to get a sense of the actual size of the bomb.
And you know where they're from their IP or something like that.
Right, exactly.
The browser tells me what country you're in and can tell me more or less what region
you're in.
It doesn't tell me, I'm not interested in knowing what house you're in or things like
that, but it doesn't tell me that information anyway.
And I can tell where you're dropping it.
And so people that are nuking things that I think is plausible that they've been to
that city, that's exactly the point of it, right?
It's meant so that you blow it up and you say, oh yeah, I've walked that distance before.
I know how much destruction that would be, that would be this house and that supermarket
or what have you.
Then there's what I call cathartic, which is people nuking places it's unlikely they've
been.
So people in different countries will nuk certain other countries where I think the
odds that they're nuking a place they've actually been before is very low.
So people in America sometimes will nuk Pyongyang in North Korea.
Very few Americans have been to Pyongyang, North Korea or Tehran, Iran, right?
Are those the big ones that Americans tend to nuk?
Well, Americans are actually pretty equal opportunity.
The only two places that we nuk more than anybody else, we nuk everybody to be sure.
The only two places that we nuk more than anybody else are Hiroshima and Nagasaki because
we recreate the World War II nukings.
But everywhere else, we don't really nuk any one place statistically that high.
That's different than some countries.
So the Russians like to nuk Americans.
That's their number two who they nuk all the time.
And who's the number one for the Russians?
Themselves.
Most countries nuk themselves the so-called correct way of using it.
Most people, there are a few countries that don't, but almost everybody nukes themselves
the most so that rate differs.
And the number two is America and the number three they spread out among other places.
So you can look at this sort of thing.
So how many people are using it just for fun?
No doubt some large numbers.
But fortunately, if only half of that large number are doing it for learning, that's still
a very large number of learning taking place.
That's still a very large percentage.
I do try to make things in there that make it hard to just laugh about it.
So there's a button in there.
It's not extremely prominent, but it's in there called humanitarian impact.
And it will tell you how many schools and how many churches and how many hospitals and
fire departments are destroyed.
And this is, again, schools is a variable that people don't like to think about.
Historically, there's an interesting side note.
Schools were very useful for determining the fatality rates of the Hiroshima Nagasaki bombs
because they're one of the few social institutions that will tell you how many people were supposed
to be there on that day.
And then you can compare with how many people are still around.
And so they have all of these very gristly graphs showing all of the different elementary
schools and how they correspond with the fatality rates for the bombs.
So schools are going to be part of any kind of destruction in the city.
And you tell that to people.
And then they don't laugh quite as hard.
It ceases to be about, I attack my evil enemies, and it starts being about, oh right, these
are just people.
These are civilians.
These are kids.
Yeah.
So NUCMAP is one way of bringing the concept of nuclear weapons to the people.
When you look at the disarmament movement today in light of nuclear secrecy and also
just in light of apathy, what ways would you have or suggest to frame the message so that
people can actually get their heads around this topic?
Yeah.
The way I usually talk about questions of disarmament is to change the question a little
bit.
And this is one of my main issues is that in the world today, people have very quick answers
to any question.
They have a sort of knee-jerk response.
It's been somewhat programmed into them.
We don't always know who the sources of the programming are.
It could be schools.
It could be friends.
It could be different books they've read.
But whenever somebody has just a quick response, I try to find a way to short-circuit that
and make them rethink it over.
So my question is usually not, should we get rid of nuclear weapons?
But what's the minimum number of nuclear weapons to make everybody feel safe?
And that becomes a very different answer.
For some people, it's going to be zero.
They're going to say, I'll feel safer if there are none.
Some people will say, well, maybe if there's about 100, right, then the odds of accidentally
using them or you wouldn't be tempted to use all your weapons at once.
You can't kill everybody.
But maybe they would still act as a deterrent.
We don't trust Russia.
We don't trust China, North Korea, things like that.
For some people, it's going to be a couple thousand.
So the current U.S. official response is it's about 5,000 makes us feel safe, but that's
because the Russians also have about 5,000.
You can lower that number.
In the United Kingdom, it's about 250.
In China, it's about 250.
So even countries will give you different responses to this.
But I like it because it focuses on the practical issues.
My problem with a lot of thinking on nuclear weapons in general for all political standpoints
is we treat them mythologically.
We treat them as proxies for Armageddon.
We treat them as the end of the world in a generic sense.
You can't avoid it.
You can't control it.
If they go off, we all die.
And the truth is, and the nuke map is partially meant to emphasize this.
If a weapon of some size goes off, the whole world doesn't end.
But it's really terrible.
It's a terrible type of thing that you want to avoid.
You want to work very hard to avoid it.
But if a couple of weapons go off, then you have climate change implications.
If a couple hundred go off, you can lower the overall temperature by a few degrees, have
bad crops.
It's bad.
It's bad.
Will it make the whole human species extinct?
Probably not.
We're really pretty rugged creatures.
We've lived through ice ages and things like that.
Is that something you would want to avoid incredibly?
Yes.
No question about it.
But making it kind of more mundane and taking it out of the realm of everything flashes
white and thus the world is a wasteland, when people think of nuclear war as everything
flashes white and it becomes a wasteland, you stop thinking about it in real terms.
You start thinking about it as something that could really happen.
It starts to fall into almost biblical mythological proportions.
If you think about it as something that happens, and this is a mundane human technology that
we built with our hands and we took rocks out of the ground and fashioned them into
these things, it now becomes something you can say, well, I don't know, maybe we only
need a hundred of these things.
Can we get down to that level and then try to push for zero?
It becomes things that these are just other people running the system and it's a bunch
of wires and a bunch of metal.
We have control over this.
Human beings made these, they can unmake these, we can make the decisions about them.
We don't have to feel like this is in some realm of fatalism that we don't have any
impact on.
Do you think it should go for an emotion such as fear or go for more of the economic standpoint
or from a historical basis, what do you think would be the most effective argument or framing
now?
It's tricky.
One of the sort of historical lessons about fear is that it gets out of your hands very
quickly and so the disarmament in the past tried to use fear very heavily and fear can
backfire on you.
If I tell you nuclear weapons are terrible and you should fear them and if somebody
used them it would be the end of the world, maybe that will lead you to think we should
get rid of them, maybe it will lead you to be so afraid of them that you'll think we
need a lot of them because that's the only way we're going to keep Russia or Iran or
North Korea from using them.
So what does work?
What does work?
In terms of the disarmament movement, what I want people to do is to be able to think
about the parameters of it.
I want them to be able to have a sort of level headed discussion where you can say, look,
would it be the end of the world if this happened?
No.
Would it be awful?
Yes.
There's a pamphlet I like to show my students because it deserves them greatly and that's
enjoyable.
It really gets them right in the gut.
And it's a pamphlet the government made in 1956 and it's made for practitioners of the
mortuary industry and so it's about people who bury bodies and it says it's a very practical
minded thing for what are you going to do with all the bodies after nuclear war?
And it has these lines in it that really just hit at home that this is not something you
can fantasize about doing but are really practical.
So one of the things that points out, if you wanted to identify 10,000 corpses, you laid
them out.
That's five and a half miles long.
You have to walk through five and a half miles of corpses and I just have my students.
That's only 10,000.
They project millions of casualties and deaths in this.
Who wants that job?
It says that if you wanted to bury the corpses, you'd need to get a trench digger and lay
them end to end and suddenly you cannot, it stops being this flash that starts being
about women and children and people.
I think that kind of practical imagery motivates people more than, if it's all about fear,
people get fatalistic.
They say, I don't have any control over this but if it's about specific situations you
want to avoid, people start feeling like they're in control and they can do something.
So on that note of practicality, we thank you so much for having joined us and shared
your insights with us.
Thank you so much.
And we highly encourage you to go to his wonderful website which you will see listed below.
Thank you so much for joining us.
