Many years ago, I audited a graduate course in the history of science, and the deft professor offered students this reasonable advice for success: display mastery over a single event, a single person, a single topic. Never, ever, attempt to tell the history of an entire era or subject. Wellerstein never heeded such advice. He finished his stellar graduate thesis more than a decade ago, and in the introduction to his book, which evolved from that thesis, he readily admits the difficulties of his research. Only a certain kind of person, both foolish and resolute, would choose to study a subject so extensive, yet so restrictive, as the secrets of nuclear weapons. Too many impediments are intrinsic to the task. Secrets, after all, are secrets. Their censorship and classification are blockades to any historian.
All archives have gaps and omissions, Wellerstein explains, but even so: “What makes secrecy feel different is its intentionality: the information I may want is actually knowable and may even be known, but just not by me, at least right now.” He could have submitted to a security clearance to be in the know, but he elected not to. “This no doubt leaves many additional gaps in the story, but it also allows me to share what I have found with impunity.”
Share he does. Like drunks and essayists, government classifiers sometimes disclose too much, owing to overwork and the technical nature of their enterprise. Wellerstein is also an archive rat, who has seemingly built a nest from every document available to him. The gaps he has to leap over are merely extra degrees of difficulty that add to his impressive score.
The history of secrecy and security in the United States is in part the story of science and technology. In Restricted Data, Wellerstein has drafted one of the finest blueprints of our national security apparatus by focusing on nuclear weapons, its deepest cogs and wheels. He reveals the wiles, machinations, and ruses of physicists who first kept the secrets of the nucleus. He uncovers the prevarications, leaks, and conspiracies of the officers and bureaucrats who held those physicists to account. He has found a peephole into a stadium where the most important games are played.
For as long as humans have lived, humans have lied. In the United States, the government is a reflection of its people, yet equivocations were not formally ingrained into American law until 1911. Secrets always multiply during times of war, and during World War I they duly escalated, owing to the new technologies employed by the US military and fears of espionage. But the classifications of secret documents did not really get going until World War II. And as Wellerstein argues, it was the possibility of even greater technologies of murder, the discovery of nuclear fission and the development of atomic weapons, that helped institutionalize secrecy afterward.