Henry Stimson didn’t go to Kyoto on his honeymoon
The Nuclear Secrecy Blog
by Alex Wellerstein
8M ago
The city of Kyoto was the only great city of Japan to be spared serious bombing during World War II, despite being among the top targets preferred for the atomic bomb, thanks to the unprecedented and extraordinary efforts by the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, to protect it. I have written at length on this, and why I have come to think that the issue of Kyoto is actually the key to understanding quite a lot about Truman and the bomb, both prior to and after its use. Whenever the issue of Kyoto comes up in popular discussions, however, one other assertion always arises: that Stimson saved ..read more
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Deconstructing “The Doomsday Machine” – Part 1: The Question of Memory
The Nuclear Secrecy Blog
by Alex Wellerstein
10M ago
When I learned several months ago that Daniel Ellsberg had pancreatic cancer, and was opting not to treat it, I was not quite sure what I ought to do. I consider it a great honor that I got to spend several days with Ellsberg, a few years back, and was periodically in touch with him since then. I’d like to think he was something of a friend, though I never knew him deeply or for that long of a time. After thinking on it for several days, and feeling conflicted, and talking about it with a friend whose life experience exceeds mine by almost five decades, I opted not to reach out to him when I h ..read more
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Oppenheimer: Vacated but not Vindicated
The Nuclear Secrecy Blog
by Alex Wellerstein
1y ago
One of the sleeper news items of last week was that the Department of Energy officially vacated the Atomic Energy Commission decision that stripped J. Robert Oppenheimer of his security clearance in 1954. It did come as a surprise to me. I knew that there was a campaign to overturn Oppenheimer’s clearance loss — I had been asked to give representatives from the American Institute of Physics a background talk about it, in order to help them determine whether to take a stance on it — and also knew that there had been previous, unsuccessful efforts in this respect. “Beyond loyalty, the harsh req ..read more
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Did the Japanese offer to surrender before Hiroshima? (Part 2)
The Nuclear Secrecy Blog
by Alex Wellerstein
1y ago
This is second post of a two part series on this topic. Click here for part one. Did the Japanese offer to surrender before the atomic bombs were dropped in August 1945? In my first post earlier this week, I gave what we might call the standard diplomatic history answer: no, they didn’t. There were “peace feelers” to the Soviet Union from an important minority of the Japanese government, which is quite interesting and complicates the overly-simple picture of Japanese fanaticism that is often told about their refusal to surrender, but they don’t constitute, in any meaningful sense, a real offer ..read more
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Did the Japanese offer to surrender before Hiroshima? (Part 1)
The Nuclear Secrecy Blog
by Alex Wellerstein
1y ago
This is part one of a series of two posts on this topic. Click here for part two. One of the most common invocations made in the service of “the atomic bombs weren’t necessary” argument is that the Japanese offered to surrender well before Hiroshima, and that this was ignored by the United States because they wanted to drop the bombs anyway (for various other asserted reasons). It’s one of those things that has a grain of truth to it, but without a heaping of context and interpretation is misleading by itself.  The Suzuki Cabinet, who held the fate of Japan in their hands in the summer o ..read more
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NUKEMAP temporary mirror
The Nuclear Secrecy Blog
by Alex Wellerstein
1y ago
A quick note: Because of the war in Ukraine and Putin’s mention of nuclear weapons, NUKEMAP has been for the last week experiencing abnormally high loads of traffic. This has meant that a lot of people are having trouble accessing the website. I’ve been doing what I can to help on the back end of it, but there are limits to my resources and knowledge about such things. In the meantime, I have created a temporary, authorized mirror of the website that you can try to use: https://nukemap.org/nukemap/ (If you are wondering, “why does the blog work when NUKEMAP doesn’t,” it is because they are on ..read more
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10 years of NUKEMAP
The Nuclear Secrecy Blog
by Alex Wellerstein
1y ago
I was somewhat surprised to realize that today is the 10th anniversary of my unveiling of NUKEMAP. Historians should not be surprised by the passing of time, but people are, and historians are people, so, well, here I am, continually surprised. NUKEMAP as it looks at the moment. You can see some previous iterations in this post. The most disturbing effect of the passing of time with NUKEMAP has been the slightly different ways in which people talk to me about having used it. After a couple of years, I started to get people coming up to me and saying, “I used NUKEMAP when I was an undergradua ..read more
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Surely You’re Joking, Comrade Beria!
The Nuclear Secrecy Blog
by Alex Wellerstein
1y ago
In my recent article on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Tsar Bomba test, I relied very heavily on Russian sources that were digitized by Rosatom, the Russian nuclear agency. For whatever reason, Rosatom has been dedicating an impressive amount of resources to Soviet nuclear history, radically transforming what is easily available to scholars outside of Russia. The extraordinarily useful series of (curated, redacted) archival documents, Atomniy Projekt SSSR (Atomic Project of the Soviet Union), for example, went nearly overnight from being something only existed in full in a ha ..read more
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A decade of Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog
The Nuclear Secrecy Blog
by Alex Wellerstein
1y ago
Ten years ago today, I posted my first entry to Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog. It’s trite to remark on how quickly a decade can fly by… but it’s still amazing to experience it. I thought that I would mark the occasion by writing down some thoughts on the history of the blog, some general thoughts on academic blogging, and some thoughts on the future of this blog. I apologize for the length and self-indulgence in this sort of thing. I don’t expect it will be of particular interest to most readers, but perhaps to other academics (especially those just starting) who look at this blog ..read more
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“The possibility of bigger bangs”
The Nuclear Secrecy Blog
by Alex Wellerstein
1y ago
I’m excited to announce the publication of a new article of mine in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: “An Unearthly Spectacle: The untold story of the world’s biggest nuclear bomb.” As the title suggests, it’s about high-yield nuclear weapons. How high? “Very high” — which was the US jargon for weapons with yields above 50 megatons. It’s research I’ve been working on for many years now — you can see some of my early exploration into this on this post from 2012… how the time flies! — and I’m excited for it to finally see the light of day. (Let nobody ever accuse me of rushing to press too ..read more
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