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RESTRICTED DATA

The Nuclear Secrecy Blog
by Alex Wellerstein
News and Notes


NUKEMAP TEMPORARY MIRROR

by Alex Wellerstein, published February 28th, 2022

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 different servers.)

NUKEMAP is, as always, basically a one-man operation, and that man has other
responsibilities that fill his time as well. Thank you for your patience. Thank
you as well to Global Zero, who is paying for NUKEMAP’s server and map-tiling
bills, and Mapbox, who helps keep those affordable for me.



Tags: NUKEMAP
Posted in News and Notes | Leave a Comment »


Meditations


10 YEARS OF NUKEMAP

by Alex Wellerstein, published February 3rd, 2022

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 undergraduate,” which wasn’t so bad, since said people
were generally in graduate school. But now I get people who tell me they used
NUKEMAP in elementary school, and the people telling me this are not in middle
school, but look like adults. Which on the one hand makes me feel great — like
I’m having an impact in this world — but on the other hand makes me feel old,
because of course to me it still feels like I just created this site “the other
day.”

I’m not going to write a long post reflecting on how I feel about the site,
because I did that five years ago and my thoughts haven’t really changed.
I still have things I’d like to add to it, and I’m still working on it pretty
regularly, but as I wrote recently in reflecting on 10 years of blogging, I
never have quite enough time to get all the things done I’d like. But some
things that have been in the works for the last couple of years, which should
come to fruition sometime in the next year include:

 1. 1a localization project so that NUKEMAP can be translated into languages
    other than English (in principle easy to do, in practice just very time
    consuming)
 2. much better mobile support for NUKEMAP (this is almost done)
 3. a means for calculating the possible areas of fire burn based on terrain
    type (this has been in the works for years but last summer a student working
    with me made huge progress on it)
 4. one of several means of visualizing 3D mushroom clouds again (variants of
    the NUKEMAP3D concept; a team of students is currently working on one of
    these, and I have another quick-and-dirty approach I am thinking of trying
    to implement)
 5. a dynamic fallout model so you can see the fallout plume grow and decay over
    time (a team of students working for me last summer made great progress on
    this front, but I’d need to really sit down with it for awhile to get it
    ready to deploy)

There are also some little tweaks to the underlying effects model I’ve been
meaning to make (the prompt radiation curve gets out of whack at some yields,
it’d be nice to have something related to underground or underwater detonations;
the mushroom cloud to KMZ export has some little annoying bugs in it). 

The main thing not in the works that I get asked about all the time is support
for EMP effects, and that is because a) there are no open-source models of EMP
effects that I have been able to find that allow you to draw useful
visualizations of them (if anyone knows of one, let me know, but I’ve looked for
years), and b) even if I could draw a nice HEMP SMILE diagram for a nuke at
arbitrary yield and arbitrary height of burst, it’s nontrivial to translate
those visualizations into meaning for people, and this is an area that is so
fraught with political implications and technical disagreements/uncertainty that
I am a little hesitant to go into it (I am not an EMP alarmist, but I also don’t
think it would be nothing, and finding a model that would let me convey the
lived reality of it is difficult). This could change in the future, depending on
what is out there and how I feel about it, but I don’t have any ongoing plans to
dip my toe into this debate right now (I revisit this question about once a
year, for what it is worth).  

Pageviews for NUKEMAP as of today. 48.8 million total pageviews (38 million
unique).

One thing that I’ve been meaning to do for years (“when I get some time,” ha),
is to do a more comprehensive analysis of NUKEMAP usage behaviors and make that
data easily accessible. This anniversary snuck up on me, so I haven’t been able
to roll that out today. But here’s a little sample of some of that data.

NUKEMAP collects two kinds of different statistics of users. First, just the
basic demographic information and page usage information that Google Analytics
provides (which is useful but very “high level”). Second, unless you disable it,
every detonation a user make is logged into a gigantic database, including some
information about the user (e.g., if it can, it will try to figure out from a
user’s IP address what country they are in). All geographical data is fuzzed by
enough that I can’t tell exactly where nukes are aimed (I trim enough off of the
latitudes and longitudes that I can see basic areas but not specific buildings),
and I don’t keep any user-identifiable information (IP addresses are not
logged). The resulting data is pretty interesting, but at this point there’s a
LOT of it — there have been about 220 million detonations. That’s a large-enough
dataset that even manipulating the data can take awhile, but I’m in the process
of having a machine crunch it down into usable pieces so I can actually do some
analysis of it.

Who uses NUKEMAP? More like, who doesn’t? This is from Google Analytics.

But here are a few little samples. Who uses NUKEMAP? Pretty much every nation
with an outgoing internet connection has had at least one visitor to NUKEMAP,
which is a little amazing and overwhelming, even more so since NUKEMAP is in
English (obviously there are ways to translate websites on the fly, but it’s an
obvious impediment). The top users are Americans, no surprise there, but the
list from then on is interesting. Here are the top 10 countries by NUKEMAP
users:

 1.  United States of America, 14.2 million users (34% of total)
 2.  United Kingdom, 2.4 million (7.5%)
 3.  Canada, 1.4 million (4.4%)
 4.  Germany, 1.1 million (3.5%)
 5.  Russia, 1.1 million (3.3%)
 6.  Australia, 977K (3%)
 7.  France, 856K (2.6%)
 8.  Poland, 633K (1.9%)
 9.  Spain, 582K (1.8%)
 10. Brazil, 572K (1.8%)

At one point, Google Analytics said it had been visited at least once from North
Korea, but now it seems to be not so sure. I’ve no idea how accurate something
like that could be, of course. It’s a little amusing to imagine Kim Jong-Un
using it; hopefully he’d look at it and say, “gosh, let’s avoid having this
happen.”

The oddest “use stories” I get are from people who do work in various aspects of
the US government, military, or nuclear complex who tell me that they like to
use it to “play around” with things that don’t feel “right” to do on official
government software. I take that as high praise, even if it does present certain
uncomfortable aspects!

What are the most popular yields of weapons that people test? It probably comes
as no surprise who the King of the Bombs is — the Tsar Bomba’s maximum design
yield (100 Mt) is by far the most popular yield, with over 81 million
simulations by itself (37% of the total detonations). After that, it gets much
more equitable, at least among the preset options, which (with two exceptions)
are the most popular individual yield choices: the 50 Mt Tsar Bomba gets 5%
(11.9 million), 20 kt (Fat Man and Nagasaki) also is 5% (9.9 million), 15 kt
(Hiroshima) gets 4% (9.3 million), and the Davy Crockett (20 tons) gets 4% (9
million). None of that is super surprising based on why and how people use
NUKEMAP: the two  World War II yields (NUKEMAP always gets a lot of traffic
around the anniversaries), the Tsar Bomba (biggest bomb), and the Davy Crockett
(smallest bomb) look a whole lot like what I see when I ask people what they do
with NUKEMAP (trying the biggest, the largest, the known). After these ones you
get a dwindling percentage for each yield in the preset list, down to the least
popular, 300 tons (B61 mod 3), which gets a little over a million uses. The only
two yield settings that get higher than a million and are not in the preset list
are 1 kt and 10 kt — which is not super surprising, either.

All together, the preset options make up 92% of what people try when they use
NUKEMAP. That 8% of “non-preset” NUKEMAP can be pretty wild, though; people try
lots of weird numbers, the purpose of which I cannot really guess. Most of them
are either nice round numbers (e.g., 3800, or 40), which sort of makes sense,
and some of them are just-off from round numbers (99,999), which might be
experimentation (what’s a kiloton, between friends?). With such a large number
of users, even a tiny bit of spontaneous experimentation means a lot of uses —
27,362 people each tried 99 kilotons. Over 19,000 people opted for more obvious
symbolism of 666 kt. 

The most interesting to me are trends about who nukes who. These are harder to
get at, because while it is easy to figure out the target of a NUKEMAP nuke
(it’s whatever latitude and longitude the user chooses), it’s trickier to
accurately get information about where the user is located, especially since I
am trying to avoid anything that would compromise their privacy (people are
already “spooked” by nuclear topics, and a frequent comment about NUKEMAP online
is that if you use it, you’ll be “on a list” — if so, then we’re all on the
list).

There was a period in which this kind of anonymized user location data was
provided easily by Google, and then that got very unreliable for awhile, and
only in the last few years was I able to once again start getting that data
again (using an IP address lookup table function I wrote), but even that is not
entirely accurate (because people can use VPNs, and IP lookup tables can be
inaccurate or go out of date). I wasn’t able to get the database to collate that
data in time for this blog post (the dataset is big and not indexed, so it can
take hours to run big queries — this is fixable, of course, but not in the span
of an hour or two). So look for that in the near future. In the past, it has had
some interesting patterns regarding how people in some countries use NUKEMAP to
model attacks on other countries.

NUKEMAP still pulls in a respectable number of hits per day on a slow day — on
the order of 10,000 or so. On a “viral” day that can kick up an order of
magnitude, and those still happen (as I write this, there are a bunch of “what
would happen if we got nuked?” articles going around for cities in Scotland),
though it has been awhile since it had a “super viral” day of over 100,000
visitors. More views equal more education, but the cost of operation also scales
pretty linearly as well. So I’m extremely grateful to the organizations that
make the financial aspects of NUKEMAP possible: Mapbox for giving me a decent
educational/humanitarian discount for the tile services; Global Zero for
stepping in and picking up the server bills when my previous source dried up due
to COVID belt-tightening, and the admins (esp. my dean, Kelland Thomas) at the
Stevens Institute of Technology who consider this work a core part of my
research and scholarship (which an outsider might take for granted, but any
university professor knows is something to be appreciated!). 

As always, more soon…!



Tags: 2010s, 2020s, NUKEMAP
Posted in Meditations | 3 Comments »


Visions


SURELY YOU’RE JOKING, COMRADE BERIA!

by Alex Wellerstein, published November 19th, 2021

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 handful of libraries in the United
States (I was proud to make sure that the Niels Bohr Library at the American
Institute of Physics has a complete set), to being easily accessible through the
Rosatom Digital Library.

But I’m not here to talk about the stuff that’s useful to scholars. I’m here to
talk about their section on “Atomic Fun” from the Soviet atomic bomb project.
This is a collection of, as they put it, “funny stories.”

I couldn’t help myself. Yes, this is a parody — yes, it is a joke that cuts both
ways.

It’s an odd concept. It’s hard to imagine the Department of Energy creating an
“Atomic Fun” exhibit. It’s not that there wouldn’t be things to say — the
history of the US nuclear program involves some amusing stories. Think about
Feynman’s Los Alamos antics, sneaking through fences and (ho ho!) cracking safes
with classified documents in them. Think about Niels Bohr sending a letter to
British scientists after the Nazis occupied Denmark, telling them he was okay,
and asking them to forward the message to MAUD RAY KENT. The British thought it
was an anagram for RAYDUM TAKEN — radium taken! The Nazis are definitely
building a bomb! They named their own secret bomb effort the MAUD Committee
after this sage warning! But (ho ho!) it turned out that Bohr was just trying to
send a hopeful message to the former governess of his children, Maud Ray, who
lived in the county of Kent. Whoops!

The problem is, of course, that such levity gets undercut by a) the horrific
accounts of what happened to the Japanese victims of the atomic bombs, b) other
disturbing legacies of people who are rightly classified as victims of the US
nuclear complex (downwinders, exposed plant employees, the Marshallese, etc.),
and c) a reminder that we are having some laughs in the service of the building
of weapons of mass destruction and there’s something inherently problematic
about that. 

We can make some jokes about the Manhattan Project and nuclear testing, but they
have to be a little askew from actual history and reality. Source: XKCD,
obviously.

But maybe Russia is different. Maybe they’ve just got a deeper sense of pathos,
and a sense of shared victimhood. The Soviet atomic bombs were built under
Stalin. Lavrenty Beria, one of the most fearsome figures in Soviet history, ran
the program. Forced GULAG labor was used for the project, under horrendous
conditions. The whole thing is just so dark that maybe, perhaps, you can get
away with a little humor — maybe it’s a necessary thing. Maybe it’s a Freudian
release of tension: you have to sometimes laugh, as a country and a culture, so
you don’t just cry.

Or maybe it’s part of the “Stalin wasn’t so bad” nationalist revisionism that
has been building in Putin’s 21st-century Russian Federation. I don’t know.

Either way, I find it fascinating. 

Let’s start with my favorite story from the website, “And they didn’t get shot,”
which happens to be the very first one I read when I first found the site some
time back. Note that this is my own interpretive translation from the Russian.1

> They didn’t get shot
> 
> The head of the nuclear project, Lavrenty Beria, arrived in the Urals, at a
> new facility under construction. It was a cold autumn; there was nothing at
> the new site but mud, and driving there required going off-road. There was no
> housing, other than barracks. Prisoners were still hard at work laying the
> foundations.
> 
> The engineers waited, fearful of the famously harsh NKVD chief. Beria, in his
> trademark black leather coat, emerged from the car and grabbed his lower back
> in pain, having been bounced around by the rough ground. The engineers went
> cold as the thought raced through their minds: “He’ll send us to the Gulag!
> 
> 
> 
> The distinguished guest was assigned to the best barrack for his overnight
> stay. As soon as Beria lay down, the bed he was on collapsed underneath him!
> The engineers were petrified: “Someone’s getting shot!” 
> 
> In the morning, it was discovered that a prisoner had stolen Beria’s black
> leather coat. The engineers were horrified: “He’ll shoot everyone!”
> 
> But in the end, Beria did not shoot anyone. After returning to Moscow, he
> issued orders to provide the workers of the facility with better food and sent
> them new furniture. The end.

Humor is sometimes described as subverted expectations, so I guess it works out:
we all thought were going to be imprisoned or executed by one of the most
terrifying men in the Soviet Union — who imprisoned millions and had thousands
shot in the head (and we won’t even bring up the rapes) — but instead, we
weren’t! Hilarious!

Most of the stories are not quite this on-the-nose about the circumstances of
the Soviet nuclear complex; they fall into the genre of “scientists are clever,
except when they’re not, and both of those can be humorous,” which really is the
Feynman-style approach, even if the Russian sense of humor is a little
different. But there are also lots of ones that, in their own way, take the
terror-absurdist situation of working for Stalin and try to turn it into
something amusing. An example:

> Dead flies
> 
> Every evening, the young nuclear engineers at Arzamas-16 (KB-11) who worked
> with radioactive substances had to hand over their laboratory to the
> commandant of the military guard. But one night, the commandant was unusually
> late, leaving them waiting for hours. To amuse themselves, the engineers
> caught and killed flies, and piled up them by the window. 
> 
> – “What’s this?” the commandant asked sternly, after he finally arrived.
> 
> – “Flies,” the engineers replied.
> 
> – “They’re dead..!?” the commandant asked.
> 
> — “Yes, they died… from radiation…” the engineers ad-libbed.
> 
> The commandant immediately vanished. He would never come to the laboratory
> personally again, instead sending assistants. 

The premise of the humor is the same as those in Feynman’s tales about Los
Alamos, which I find interesting: dumb military flacks versus clever and bored
scientists. But it’s got a much more sinister undertone when you transpose it to
the land of Mayak and Chernobyl. 

Here’s another one, which is a twist on classic “misunderstanding” jokes:

> Deadlines for everyone
> 
> A group of engineers arrived at the construction of a secret facility. At the
> gate they were greeted by a stern major who had a placard behind him which
> read: 
> 
>         Keep in mind these important lines
>         Working hard shortens your time 
> 
> “What happened?” the worried engineers asked. “Did the government cut the
> deadlines for the project?” 
> 
> “The poster is not for you,” the major consoled them, “but for the prisoners
> working here.”2

Ah, the engineers misunderstood a message that was meant for the prison labor
force, not them! A classic Soviet-era mistake!

I am torn between finding these sorts of things to be exceedingly bizarre and
frankly offensive, versus being impressed that the Russian nuclear agency is
willing to be so… transparent (?) about the insane situation of the Soviet
nuclear program. 

Some of the stories are more in the line of “hooray for Soviet scientists”
genre, which I find a lot less interesting. There’s one about Yuri Trutnev
visiting Los Alamos in the 1990s and having a picnic with American scientists.
Suddenly, a snake emerges from under a stone, and everyone backs away except for
Trutnev, who steps forward and spits on its head, and is then celebrated as the
“hero of the day.” Ho, hum.

And there are a couple “scientist says something somewhat amusing” stories, such
as one who, after a briefing on some kind of “smart,” self-aiming delivery
system, remarks, “If the bomb becomes too smart, maybe it won’t want to fall out
of the plane!” OK. I guess.

But let’s leave with one that manages to be one of these “revealing” jokes, but
isn’t quite as dismal as the others:

> Information collection
> 
> Uranium mining in the USSR was highly classified. Even high-ranking officials
> from the Soviet nuclear ministry did not know the details of it. Once, one of
> these leaders received an American delegation. 
> 
> – “Where do you mine your uranium?” one of the guests asked.
> 
> – “Everywhere! We have a large country!” the Soviet leader replied. 
> 
> The Americans approached a large map of the USSR: “According to our satellite
> intelligence, you do it here, here, and here.”
> 
> – “Well, your intelligence is confused,” the leader explained, and eventually
> saw the delegation off. But after they had left, he rubbed his hands together
> gleefully: “Finally, I, too, know where the uranium is mined!”

Who says you can’t have a little clean, atomic humor at the expense of Soviet
secrecy?

 1. Translating non-technical Russian is already a tricky thing — my favorite
    thing about most Soviet nuclear records is that they are very literal and so
    pretty easy for someone whose Russian translation abilities are rather
    limited to make sense of — but translating humor is very difficult, since it
    is also about timing, rhythm, word-play, and cultural expectations. So I’ve
    done my best here to preserve what I perceive as the spirit of these
    stories, without worrying too much about how literal the translation is. [↩]
 2. I had to fudge the limerick translation a little bit to make it rhyme, but I
    think it captures the sentiment of the thing, as well as it being a couplet.
    [↩]



Tags: 1940s, 1950s, Bad ideas, Lavrenty Beria, Richard Feynman, Rosatom, Soviet
Union
Posted in Visions | This post has footnotes | 7 Comments »


Redactions


HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE Q CLEARANCE?

by Alex Wellerstein, published November 12th, 2021

The Q Clearance is the enigmatically-named security clearance created to allow
access Restricted Data, the legal category for nuclear secrets in the United
States (after which my book is named). It is issued by the the US Department of
Energy, and requires a single-scope background investigation (originally by the
FBI), with the same requirements as a Top Secret clearance, and keeping it
requires being re-investigated every 5 years. 

A Restricted Data stamp from a document from the 1940s. If you don’t have a Q
Clearance, you’re not supposed to see things like this. Don’t worry, this one
was declassified. Strictly speaking, they are supposed to cross the stamps out
once they declassify them. But they didn’t always do that consistently. I
photographed this one at the NARA Archives II facility. You can see more photos
I’ve taken of secrecy stamps, if that sort of thing piques your interest.

So how many people currently have Q clearances? Someone asked me this a year ago
and I realized that not only did I not know, but I didn’t really have a great
way to even estimate it. So I did the natural thing and filed a Freedom of
Information Act request to the Department of Energy and asked them. 

And today, they got back to me with this simple table:

> April 2018 – 87,113
> 
> April 2019 – 90,454
> 
> April 2020 – 98,103
> 
> April 2021 – 92,177

Which is somewhat interesting. First, I guess that’s more than I would have
guessed, but again, I didn’t have a great place to start for guessing. I knew,
from Dana Priest and William Arkin’s Top Secret America that a decade ago,
850,000 Americans had a Top Secret clearance — a remarkable number. As of 2019,
that’s up to 1.25 million.1 That Q clearances would be about 10% of that seems
reasonable once I consider it, but if you had told me it was 5%, or 15%, I also
might have thought that was reasonable, too, in the absence of information.

Second, there’s an interesting amount of fluctuation there. From 2018 to 2019,
it grew by 3,341 people, but then the next year it grew by 7,649 people, but
then it dropped by almost 6,000 people. That strikes me as a pretty impressive
amount of variance. A nearly 10% gain, followed by a 6% loss. But again, I don’t
have any more data than this tiny snapshot, so it is hard to say more about it.

Anyway, I thought people would be interested (and wanted to have an “answer” out
there in case anyone else Googled this question in the future). 

Obligatory “quick Excel graph that is not really necessary since we are talking
about a whopping four data points.”

The most amusing thing about the Q Clearance, as an aside, is that while its
name sounds so enigmatic and mysterious, its actual origins are aggressively
mundane. During the latter part of the Manhattan Project, they created a new
form called the Personnel Security Questionnaire that would be the basis of
their background checks. When the Atomic Energy Commission took over
administration of the US nuclear complex, they inherited the same form. In
figuring out early clearance levels, they decided that maybe they ought to just
call them P, S, and Q, after the PSQ form.

“P” would be for people who didn’t need access to Restricted Data and had no
access to it at all; “S” was for frequent visitors to AEC installations who
didn’t need access to Restricted Data but still needed to be in places where it
might be found; “Q” was for people who needed access to Restricted Data. So
instead of being some shadowy name, its name is literally taken from a form.
Like many secret matters, the reality is far less interesting once you get the
full story.2

 1. Thanks to Steve Aftergood at FAS for sending me this document! [↩]
 2. The P designation is still used today (but not called P Clearance, because
    it is not a clearance, strictly speaking, but an “approval”). I suspect they
    retired S at some point because it is easy to confuse with someone who is
    cleared for Secret information. [↩]



Tags: 2010s, 2020s, Clearances, Department of Energy
Posted in Redactions | This post has footnotes | 8 Comments »


Meditations | News and Notes


A DECADE OF RESTRICTED DATA: THE NUCLEAR SECRECY BLOG

by Alex Wellerstein, published November 7th, 2021

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 as some kind of “success”
will find the story interesting. You can skip to the very end if you want to
know about the future.

Me, six months before I started the blog, at my Harvard History of Science
Commencement ceremony, with my main Harvard advisors, Peter Galison and Sheila
Jasanoff. This was when I was trying out having a light beard in order to both
fit in better at the Kennedy School, and also to look a little older. These days
I do not try to look older, it comes naturally.

When I started this blog in 2011, I was a postdoc at the Center for History of
Physics at the American Institute of Physics (AIP). I had gotten my PhD the year
before, and had spent another year at Harvard on a postdoc/lecturer gig. So
going to AIP, near Washington, DC, was a big change — and a welcome one. I had
enjoyed graduate school quite a lot; despite the many anxieties and difficulties
associated with both the educational experience and the total collapse of the
economy (and the academic job market, esp. in History) a few years before, it
was still an overwhelmingly great experience. I met a lot of great people there
(many life-long friends), and got to experience the rare joy of learning about
new things for their own sake for many years on end. As time goes on I
increasingly recognize how rare that sort of environment is in our world. 

But AIP came with its challenges as well. I did not have many academic
colleagues at AIP; there were a few other historians, and it didn’t have the
same kind of rich intellectual atmosphere as Harvard (which is not its fault; it
is a different sort of institution and organization). I didn’t know too many
people in DC, and it was quite a big up-rooting from the seven years I had spent
in Cambridge. It was very exciting to live in DC during the Obama years, and
there is an impressive DC-based history of science and technology community, but
I had to really work to feel integrated into it. The up-shot of AIP was that
they gave me a ridiculous amount of autonomy (thanks Greg Good). I had a lot of
ability to spend my time as I saw fit, with the main caveat being that in three
years the fellowship would necessarily end and I would be back on the (dismal)
academic history job market again. So I had a lot of freedom, and a lot of
opportunities, but I did sort of feel like the characters in Cixin Liu’s The
Three-Body Problem, with a big timer counting down before my eyes everywhere I
looked. 

When I say the history job market was bad after 2008, this graph is an evocative
indication of what I mean. This is the latest iteration of the so-called “graph
of doom” from the American Historical Association, showing the number of new
PhDs (orange) compared to the number of advertised academic jobs (blue) in the
field of history. Obviously there are jobs for history PhDs outside of the
academy not represented by that blue line, but almost everyone who gets a PhD in
history dreams of an academic job in it (and those jobs outside of the academy
are not as plentiful and easy to get as optimistic recruiters might make them
seem). I would also draw your attention to the situation in 2004, when I started
my PhD, and 2010, when I finished it — quite a different situation! And note as
well that the job market has never really recovered from 2008. There are a lot
of reasons for that. In 2004, I remember them telling us about how to play
multiple job offers off of one another; in 2010, the advice I was given was
literally “find a cave to hide in for a few years.” Source: AHA Jobs Report 2021

I started the AIP job in the late summer of 2011. That November I went to the
annual History of Science Society meeting, which is my “main” academic
professional society, and my favorite meeting (because I have so many friends
who also attend). I was honestly feeling pretty low. I had missed my friends,
and I was feeling adrift. The problem with absolute freedom and autonomy is that
you have to make your own discipline and structure. That is not really something
I was very good at (I’ve gotten better over the years); I did best when I had
some kind of base structure of expectations to work within (and diverge from)
rather than being told to just figure it out myself. I wasn’t feeling very
productive, and I wasn’t sure what I ought to be doing.

I had a really productive conversation at HSS with Karen Darling, then
acquisitions editor for history of science at University of Chicago Press. I
really wanted to publish my first book with them, on the history of nuclear
secrecy (which was the subject of my dissertation). Karen basically told me that
I ought to think about what I wanted the book to “do” for me. Did I just need it
to get a job, or to serve as my main tenure contribution? Did I want it to be
read by people outside of my field? Did I want it to try and change the
discourse about the topic? Did I want to become the “go to” person on nuclear
history?

These were not questions I had really considered before; I sort of saw the book
as a natural thing to do, but wasn’t really thinking about it in functional
personal or career terms. It also made me realize that I needed to really think
functionally about how I was going to end up with a job at the end of the
postdoc. Senior scholars had told me, you need to just finish your book and put
out some articles. But academic books and articles are slow — how many could I
realistically get “in the pipeline” before I needed that payoff? — and they also
could take years to have an “effect” on the academy in a field like history (it
is not “fast-paced” like the sciences can be). My goal, as I conceived it, was
for the people reviewing my job applications to know my name before they read my
application. How could I do that while also working on articles and the book?

A dignified picture of myself in DC, from December 2011. Don’t ask me.

I came away from HSS thinking that what I want to do is plant a flag: I wanted
to stake out some territory in this field, declare loudly that this was what I
was doing and was interested in, and eventually get this book done.1 The
dissertation was very long and I figured I would need to cut a lot of
interesting things from it, and I thought it would be nice to have a place to
put those leavings (it never really ended up working that way, though).

So I decided that starting a blog was the way to go. Even in 2011 that was a
little behind the times; people were already talking about blogging as an
outmoded activity (the discourse was sort of how people talking about starting a
podcast at the moment — oversaturated field, likely audience and success quite
small, return on investment of time probably low). But I figured it couldn’t
hurt. It would give me an opportunity to practice writing about this subject, it
would give me a place to off-load a lot of the interesting things I was finding
and talking about (a function that in grad school had been fulfilled by talking
to my academic friends about it), and it would perhaps alert others (esp. in the
DC area) to the fact that I existed and knew some stuff. I was somewhat inspired
by Jeffery Lewis’ blog, Arms Control Wonk, which everyone I knew in the nuke
world read, and it appeared to me that he had figured out a way to side-step the
standard academic hierarchy of Big Schools with Big Names and Big Journals and
Big Resumes to create something that simultaneously elevated his own expertise
(by demonstration) as well as played a role in “the discourse.” 

It’s perhaps hard to express now, to any regular reader of the blog, how obscure
I was in 2011. I was known by some other historians of science, especially those
who did nuke things. I had published a well-placed paper on the history of
Manhattan Project patenting practices (itself a very anti-climatic experience —
this came out in the biggest journal of my field, and I got a total of one
e-mail from someone saying, “hey, I saw your paper, and it was really
interesting!” That particular someone became one of my first academic friends in
DC, as an aside — thanks, Leo!). I had managed to parlay that paper into an
appearance on NPR’s Morning Edition, which was super exciting. But the people
who knew me were mostly academic historians of science, which is not a huge
crowd. 

The first two weeks of blog posts as seen in the post archives — three per week!
In November 2011 I published 11 blog posts!

The blog by itself did OK at first. Not great. But OK. My early posts ranged in
quality; I was really feeling out the genre. I gave myself an insane goal for
content-creation: three posts per week. Monday would be some sort of general
think-piece (“Musings”), Wednesday would be focused on a document
(“Redactions”), and Friday would be something visual (“Visions”). I had a lot of
documents and images, so I figured those would go pretty easily, and that I
could use the “Musings” to look at larger issues. I had some people who started
reading regularly, but it was still fairly niche. 

The thing about a schedule like that (three times a week) is that it re-wires
your brain. In my academic writing and research I take years to finish a paper.
I couldn’t do that on the blog; I needed “content” almost daily. So my brain
started looking for content everywhere. Every time I saw something interesting
(in my research, at a talk, in the newspaper, on the subway, wherever) my brain
would start to click: “that could be the basis of a post.” It was a really
radical change in thinking about my subject matter. It was not the one that is
encouraged in programs of study for academic history, where long-simmering
interest is the name of the game (which I love, as an aside — I really do think
you get different results spending years thinking about something, as opposed to
days). I had a real burst of creativity as a result, just constantly trying to
turn my every odd thought into something “useful.” It would even motivate me to
do things I probably wouldn’t have done otherwise. Need content? Go to a talk
that looks interesting and write about it! Get off your seat and go to the
archives! Go through the documents on your computer one more time and look for
something interesting to write about! 

Anyway, one of the things that came out of this was NUKEMAP. There are various
versions of the story of how and why I made NUKEMAP (all true to one degree or
another, but as any historian — or journalist — will tell you, there are
different ways to tell a story), but it is worth saying here that the initial
impetus was caused by this search for blog content. I did not expect NUKEMAP to
become as big as it became. Not in the slightest. I thought it was a cool little
thing to do, and I made the first version over a weekend (which should impress
upon you how easy it was to make, not that I am some master coder or anything).
But then it blew up (the inevitable pun) in a big way, and started driving huge
amounts of traffic to my blog. If 10,000 people a day use NUKEMAP (which is what
it is like on a “slow” day) and 1% of those people discover my blog for the
first time, then that’s 100 potential new blog readers seeing it per day. That’s
huge for an academic. As it is, the blog itself could also get thousands of
people per day at that point, depending on the topic, and that was just because
more eyes had been drawn to it. (Today, the blog gets about 1,000 visits a day
despite the fact that I rarely update it. Not huge numbers by Internet
standards, but by standard academic standards, that’s massive.)

Gradually it became clear to me that the blog and NUKEMAP were the ticket to the
functional success I was looking for. It really was getting my name out there.
It also felt like it underscored the accuracy of the theory I had been working
with regarding using the Internet to create a different sort of academic
success. The number of people who read my “big” article on nuclear patenting
seemed pretty small — aside from people working on almost-the-same topic, or
some unfortunate graduate students who were forced to read it in a few seminars,
I felt like I could count on my fingers the number of people who knew what it
said. But NUKEMAP was not only getting famous in newspapers and on places like
Reddit, it was feeding back into the academy and even the policy world. I was
getting invited to give all sorts of interesting talks; I was becoming known as
a “nuclear historian” well outside of my home discipline. Which you might think
would induce some kind of impostor syndrome, but long ago (at Harvard) I
realized that pretty much everyone was just faking it until they made it, so I
had already internalized that it was OK if I was doing that too.2 

Did I mention my book was now out? Did I? If I didn’t… it’s out! This message
brought to you by my publisher, who had to (patiently) wait a decade for this
book.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that I got invited to give a talk at a
university I had never heard of, the Stevens Institute of Technology, about
NUKEMAP (thanks Ed Friedman and Charles Ferguson). While I was there I also
became aware that they had a job opening that might be a good fit for me (thanks
John Horgan and Lee Vinsel), and I applied for it, and (barely) got it, and so
the blog actually did the job I set out for it to do. The book that was in
theory one of the motivations for this blog, Restricted Data: The History of
Nuclear Secrecy in the United States, was published by the University of Chicago
earlier this year. And as of this fall, I have tenure. So it all worked out — in
fact, it worked out much better than I would have guessed, if you had asked me
in 2011 what I thought the “best-case scenario” would be. I’m still kind of in
awe of that, and well-aware that a lot of that was luck (that is, completely
beyond my control — even the popularity of the NUKEMAP had more to do with a few
UK tabloids deciding to make a much bigger deal of it than was warranted early
on than anything I did). 

Of course, the irony is that the more successful I became, the less I blogged.
Now we’re down to a single blog post every few months. It’s not a coincidence,
of course. When I started the blog, I had almost zero responsibilities. Now I
have lots. I am a Program Director, meaning that I advise students and attend
Curriculum Committee meetings and now that I have tenure I work on the Promotion
and Tenure Committee and etc. etc. etc. I also teach and grade and so on. And
success creates more work: I have grants for (very cool) projects, but those all
take time (not just research time, but also administration, budgeting,
applications, etc.). So the hours I have in a day to spend on any research-like
work are much constrained from the beginning. (What I don’t have are children —
by choice — so my day is still way more free than most academics’.)

On top of that, my options for publishing have increased. If I find a topic that
seems like it is really promising, publishing it on my blog is really the least
attractive option for it at this point. I’d much rather turn it into a “real
publication,” something that could be seen by a wider audience and count much
higher on my resume (because despite wanting to get around the traditional
academic hierarchy, I am still largely rewarded — tenure, grants, etc. — by
things that show up in the traditional resume). So I could have published my
latest article on the Tsar Bomba on my blog, but publishing it with the Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists would both give it a wider audience (and it would look
a lot better, both visually and editorially, because other eyes would be on it
first), but would also give it more credibility than “just a blog post” (as my
blog posts are sometime sneered at). I can usually find a higher-profile venue
to publish my work these days (this was not the case earlier in my career), so
the temptation is always to just do that, now. Of course, I do write blog posts
after something comes up elsewhere (and I like having that option), but in the
end I spend a lot less time thinking about the blog than I used to when I think
about publishing. 

Lastly, as my blog audience got larger, I started feeling more pressure to
perform. Many of my early posts were very light and easy — here’s a document,
look what it says, how neat! Look at this image, it’s amazing, huh! I wouldn’t
really feel like that was “cutting it” these days, and so when I do spend time
to write a blog post, I feel the need, internally, to spend a lot more time on
it. I’m aware-enough to realize that’s kind of a nonsensical trap: there is
certainly an audience of people who would be perfectly happy with shorter posts
(if you’re reading this one, good on you), and some of my favorite blog posts of
yore are pretty short and sweet (I still love this one on Oppenheimer’s eye
color; very short, very simple, but there’s a semi-profound historical point
buried in it, maybe). But this is why many of the posts that I have made in the
last few years have been pretty long and over-wrought. And, of course, if I am
feeling like I need to make it “worthwhile,” that easily dovetails into the
“other venues” issue — if I am going to spend that much time on something, maybe
I want to see if I can get it placed somewhere more prominently? 

My first blog post on 11/07/2011, began with this image of the Greenhouse Item
shot (1951), with its natural question-mark appearance and eerie turquoise glow.
I still really love this image as a representation of the nuclear unknown. Here
is the version of the file I used in my calendars a long time back, which has
been edited to remove dust spots, cropped to make it centered, and upscaled a
bit, but is otherwise unedited from the version I scanned at the NARA Still
Pictures division over a decade ago.

OK, you’ve read this far, and I want to sketch out a little bit about the
future. What lies ahead? Here’s what doesn’t lie ahead, first: I’m not writing
this as a “coda” for the blog. I still enjoy writing on it. I sometimes forget
how much I enjoy writing on it; it’s a really different tone and idiom than my
other writing. I can write directly to you. That still feels intimate and good.
I can write a little longer than I ought to and nobody really complains (queue
complaining). I can abuse em-dashes and semi-colons and not worry about it too
much. I can tackle historical issues that are interesting to me but not quite at
the level of “I should write a ‘real’ article about this.” And I feel, with a
blog, a little bit more like I’m interacting with a community of people, as
opposed to just “broadcasting” at them. So I like that, and I intend to keep
that as a thing in my life. I can’t guarantee that I will be able to
manufacture time for blogging — my “dance card” is pretty booked for the next
couple of years in terms of big projects — but I’d like to transition back to
having more short-and-sweet posts if I can. (Knowing me, they will probably not
be all that short in the end.) And now, pleasantly, the blog doesn’t have to do
the career “work” it did for me in the past. It can just be what it is. And I’m
looking forward to that. 

So here’s to the next decade of Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog. This
is, according to the blog software, the 290th post on the blog (29 blog posts
per year is not bad, even if it has dropped off in recent years); I still have,
somehow, 134 draft posts. Most of those will never see the light of day for good
reasons, but even if I didn’t come up with another new post idea, I’m sure
there’s more to be had. Thank you for reading, whether you’ve been there from
the beginning, or are just starting with this post. (If you are in the latter
category, the post archives are the best way to navigate older topics.) I am
unendingly grateful for those of you who have been with me on this journey so
far, and feel like I owe what success I have to all of you. Thank you. 

 1. “Planting a flag,” as I call it, was how I made friends in college as an
    undergraduate as well. UC Berkeley is a huge school and it is hard to know
    where to start when looking for people to socialize with, especially if you
    are temperamentally odd (“weird” is the word people have always
    independently come up with to talk about me and my obsessions), but I found
    success in joining (and eventually taking over) a large campus club that was
    devoted to “weird” conversations (it was sort of a philosophy club, but with
    an emphasis on discussions that included non-philosophers, and I really
    endeavored to try and make very a ideologically diverse group of people find
    it interesting and worthwhile). So I was essentially trying to replicate
    that, in retrospect, online: declare loudly what I think is interesting and
    then see who flocked to it. [↩]
 2. I call this “reverse impostor syndrome” — I’m an impostor, but so is
    everyone else, so it’s OK. [↩]



Tags: 2010s, 2020s, Books, Musings
Posted in Meditations, News and Notes | This post has footnotes | 7 Comments »


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 * Alex Wellerstein is a historian of science and nuclear weapons and a
   professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He is also the creator of
   the NUKEMAP.This blog began in 2011. For more, follow @wellerstein.
   
   New book in April 2021: Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in
   the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2021).


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