Faculty Forum: Nuclear History
By Russell Olwell
The American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, has an exhibition detailing the cleanup of the chemical and atomic waste left behind from its role as a processor of uranium and plutonium for the Manhattan Project, the U.S. effort to develop nuclear weapons during World War II. The final result is a pit filled in and covered over with a thick layer of concrete.
The same fate may be in store for the field of nuclear history, where tightened federal classification rules threaten to close off a whole area of the past. The death of nuclear history is not natural or unavoidable. In fact, the wide proliferation of nuclear weapons in the past decade makes the field more relevant than ever. The issues that initially drew scholars into the field—nuclear proliferation, the arms race, and international control of atomic energy—are again in the headlines. As nuclear technology spreads to more countries, a new generation of American policy makers worries about how to get the atomic genie back into the bottle, just as its predecessors did in 1945. Moreover, nuclear historians have continued to ask hard questions, such as why do Americans feel they need to police proliferation, and has there been any real atomic secret since Hiroshima?
Recent historical accounts, such as Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird’s Pulitzer Prize–winning American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer; Jennet Conant’s 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos; and Priscilla McMillan’s The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race demonstrate that the history of America’s nuclear projects and the people who built them are timely and important, worthy of scholarly and popular notice.
Such historical work is not done overnight, however. Much of the scholarship published recently was decades in the making and draws on documents declassified in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. It is not an overstatement to say that nuclear history is a child of the 1966 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and of numerous lawsuits and actions that led to declassification of key collections and documents.
For example, my own research on the history of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was made possible in 1994 when the U.S. Department of Energy released documents whose declassification revealed human radiation experiments in which thousands of individuals were exposed to radiation without their consent. Had these documents not been declassified, my findings would never have seen the light of day.
The kind of research I did may not be possible any longer because of developments that endanger the future of nuclear history. First, the government’s response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has led to a wholesale reclassification of nuclear documentation, ending decades of efforts to declassify it. The recent discovery of massive secret reclassification at the National Archives (since stopped by U.S. archivist Allen Weinstein) has confirmed suspicions that documents can move too easily from the declassified realm to classified without adequate public notice. The secretive and high-handed manner in which this reclassification has been done may have made researchers in nuclear history criminals without their knowing it if they photocopied documents at the National Archives that have been reclassified. The Justice Department has interpreted the Espionage Act as criminalizing a citizen receiving or possessing classified information. Historians as well as journalists need to be wary of what they have in their files.
Will the next generation of historians even consider exploring the topics tackled in the histories I cite above? They will face an entirely different world. Unlike those who entered the field in the 1960s and 1970s, they cannot expect the FOIA to bring about the release of nuclear documentation; in fact, many documents available now may not be in the future. Historians may not have enough information to ask questions about the nuclear past or present. Unless something is done soon, nuclear history /may become a dinosaur, even as the number of nations possessing nuclear arsenals continues to expand.
We can only hope that the recent change in the makeup of Congress will bring a new commitment to openness in the field of atomic information. Democrats, coming to power with a mandate to increase openness and transparency in government,may be able to reverse the “reign of secrecy” that has dominated the federal government since 2001.
Russell Olwell teaches in the Department of History and Philosophy at Eastern Michigan University. Academe accepts submissions to this column. See the guidelines. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the policies of the AAUP.
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