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CIAO DATE: 4/00
Secrecy, Authority and Nuclear Weapons Scientists
Hugh Gusterson
Secrecy and Knowledge Production
Judith Reppy, Editor
Peace Studies Program, Cornell University
Occasional Paper #23
October 1999
Introduction
In a recent talk at MIT the scientist and “science-in-fiction” novelist Carl Djerassi 1 pointed out that, whereas novelists often eschew personal fame by writing under pseudonyms, it is usually vitally important to scientists to win recognition for their work under their own names. In the words of the narrator of his novel The Bourbaki Gambit:
There is one character trait . . . which is an intrinsic part of a scientist’s culture, and which the public image doesn’t often include: his extreme egocentricity, expressed chiefly in his overmastering desire for recognition by his peers. No other recognition matters. And that recognition comes in only one way. It doesn’t really matter who you are or whom you know. You may not even know those other scientists personally, but they know you–through your publications. (Djerassi 1994, 18-19)
Djerassi was intrigued by a group of distinguished French mathematicians who, playing the exception to the rule, refused science’s cult of individual fame by publishing, starting in 1934, under the collective nom de plume Nicolas Bourbaki. (Their aim was, in part, to demonstrate that the truth status of knowledge was independent of the authority of its authors.) The identities of the mathematicians who made up Bourbaki were kept secret and, in Djerassi’s narrator’s words, “now people refer to him, not them” (Djerassi 1994, 18). In Djerassi’s novel the “Bourbaki gambit” of anonymous collectivization is repeated by a group of contemporary elderly scientists who together invent PCR.
I want to suggest here that the conditions of bureaucratic secrecy under which American nuclear weapons research has been conducted have created a phenomenon we might refer to as the “Bourbakification” of science. This phenomenon is by no means unique to the world of nuclear weapons science, but we can discern there the starkest shape of a mode of scientific production that is, in weaker forms, more widely dispersed. In the process of Bourbakification the distinctive contributions of individual scientists have been repressed or gathered together under the sign of sacralized individuals standing for groups. Unlike the original Bourbaki experiment, this has not been a ruse entered into voluntarily. It has been enforced by the conjoint workings of military secrecy and “big science,” both working together to produce the phenomenological death of the scientific author.
The Death of the Authors of Death
The Livermore Laboratory, America’s second weapons laboratory, was founded in 1952 in order to intensify work on the atomic and hydrogen bombs as the cold war escalated. Most parts of the laboratory are off-limits to the public, and access to spaces and to information for its 8,000 employees (almost 3,000 of them scientists and engineers with Ph.D.s) is regulated by an elaborate system of rules and taboos. The laboratory is divided into zones of greater or lesser exclusion related to the system for classifying information and people. A few areas on the perimeter of the laboratory are “white areas” accessible to the public. (These areas include two cafeterias, the Public Affairs office, the Visitors’ Center, etc.) Large parts of the laboratory are “red areas” that are off-limits to the public, although only open research is done there. (Since I did fieldwork in the late 1980s and early 1990s the proportion of red areas has increased, although weapons work remains the primary focus of the laboratory.) These red areas serve as a buffer zone around the “green areas,” constituting roughly half of the laboratory in the 1980s, where secret research is done. Only those with green badges (bestowed at the end of a lengthy investigation by the federal government) can enter these areas unescorted. Within the green areas, there are also special exclusion areas, set apart by barbed wire fences and guard booths, accessible only to a few. The plutonium facility, for example, is in an exclusion area, as is the facility where intelligence reports are handled. The laboratory, then, is a grid of tabooed spaces and knowledges segregated not only from the outside world but, to some degree, from each other as well. Red areas, for example, although they are located inside the laboratory’s perimeter fence are, in terms of informational flow, functionally a part of the outside world that is separated by informational shielding from the laboratory’s green areas–some of which are, in turn, shielded from others (Gusterson 1996, ch. 4).
Unlike academic scientists, Livermore scientists in the green areas are not under pressure to publish in order to keep their jobs. The system of a multi-year probationary period followed by either ejection or permanent tenure that organizes scientific careers in the academy does not apply at the Livermore Laboratory. Here, at least until recent financial pressures caused by the end of the cold war, scientists had near-guaranteed job security as long as they worked conscientiously and kept their security clearances in order, and the laboratory’s work ethic, especially in comparison with that of research universities, emphasized teamwork over individual distinction.
Up to the end of the cold war at least, nuclear weapons science was principally organized around the design and production of prototype devices for nuclear tests at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, and around the measurement of these tests. 2 This design and production work was undertaken by enormous multi-disciplinary teams of physicists, engineers, chemists, and technicians, with small teams of physicists playing the lead design role and overseeing the tests. The work of these physicists involved calculating the expected performance of the device, often by refining the enormous supercomputer codes used to model nuclear explosions; checking predictions against data from previous tests, and, in the process, flagging anomalies that might be resolved by further research; making serial presentations to design review committees; consulting with colleagues whose expertise might improve the experiment; consulting with representatives of the Department of Energy and the armed forces about military requirements; and overseeing the machining of parts and the final assembly of the device and the diagnostic equipment.
One weapons scientist, Peter, 3 mentioned in a recent email message to me that, “while the design activity is genuinely a group effort, neither the contribution to the effort nor the acknowledged credit for the result is evenly distributed. One person may be thought of as the principal architect, while others are given credit for significant components.” In particular, the lead designer would get special credit. In the localized face-to-face community of weapons designers, this credit would be established and circulated as much by word of mouth–in gossip and in formal presentations–as through the written documentation of individual contributions and achievements. And, in any case, the final result was as much the test itself as any written distillation of it. It was the test that ultimately clarified the validity of the designers’ theories and design approaches, and if we ask what it is that nuclear weapons designers were authoring all those years, we might have to say that it was not ultimately written texts so much as devices and “events”–the weapons scientists’ term for nuclear tests.
The world of nuclear weapons science behind the fence is, though not completely informationally imporous to the outside world, fundamentally autarchic. (One weapons designer told me that her first few years at the laboratory felt like the equivalent of a second physics Ph.D. in fields not taught at the university.) In some ways the national security state has created a national intellectual economy analogous to the traditional unmonetarized African economies described by Paul Bohannon in which there were separate spheres of exchange that could not be integrated so that, for example, the beads of one family could be exchanged for the cloth but not the food of another family, since beads and food, circulating in different spheres, were untradeable and non-convertible. Thus, although it is sometimes possible to transform information produced in the laboratory’s weapons programs into knowledge that can be traded on the open market outside the laboratory, often this is not the case. Peter described one end of the spectrum in his email message:
As you know, the people involved in weapons work range from someone like Forest Rogers 4 (who calculates wonderful opacities, but would have little practical understanding of a W or B anything [finished nuclear weapons], to Dan Patterson (who lives and breathes weapons). People at Forest’s end of the spectrum can publish the bulk of their work in regular scientific journals. As an example, the first publications of OPAL opacities (OPAL is the code that calculates the opacity) resulted in a paper that for some years was the most cited in astrophysics (fortunately uranium is not important in calculating astrophysical mixtures).
At the other extreme are scientists the very titles of whose publications are secret, so that their resumés are, to the outside world, surrealistically blank after years of labor. One of these joked during a layoff scare, “If I made a resumé there’d be nothing on it.” Another physicist, reflecting on current fears of downsizing with some bitterness, characterized the government’s attitude to its scientists as: “Thanks for defending the country. It’s too bad you don’t have a resumé, but we don’t need you now.” And, indeed, when scientists retire, they are not allowed even to keep copies of their own work if it is classified–a “death of the author” of a particularly poignant kind, as his (or her) lifetime’s creative work is confiscated and swallowed up by the state at the exact moment it releases his or her aged body. This reminds us that weapons designers do not own the knowledge they produce–do not even have a guaranteed right of access to it after they have produced it–since it belongs to the state and the bureaucratic organizations that have commissioned it. In other words, weapons scientists, despite their Ph.D.s, are wage laborers for the state–albeit well paid ones–and, in the final analysis, they have little control over the intellectual wealth they build. 5
This intellectual wealth is often well shielded from the knowledge markets of the outside world.“There was this complete disconnect with the outside world,” one scientist told me. Peter’s email message says:
Many [weapons designers] have given up outside publication entirely. Any good academic paper begins by offering a context to show why the particular detail being investigated is of interest. For example, the detailed processes of lithium production in a particular class of stars is pretty boring to most astronomers who are not nucleosynthesis afficionados. It becomes of interest when framed in the context of determining the original baryon density of the universe. The context for much weapons work cannot be provided, and thank the gods that there is no suitable academic journal for the material that they investigate.
Another scientist recalled a colleague who told him he had not been to the library in years because the outside world knew nothing of him and therefore probably had nothing of interest to say to him in its publications. This can induce a twofold sense of erasure: first, one’s achievements and hence one’s professional person may be completely invisible to the larger scientific community (or even to one’s colleagues within the laboratory: one scientist told me that one of his colleagues won the prestigious Lawrence Award for his work, but he was never able to find out what his colleague had done). Second, one’s work may be literally written over by the scientific community outside the fence which, in an inversion of the Soviet nuclear scientists’ repetition that established itself as original, publishes original work that is unknowingly a repetition. Peter’s email message describes the predicament of Livermore researchers in Inertial Confinement Fusion–until recently a highly classified technology because of its applications to thermonuclear design:
I went to a conference in 1983 at which an academic researcher was discussing hohlraums as a means of smoothing the laser pulse and converting it to X-rays. The lab people had to sit in silence as a colleague re-discovered territory that they had crossed years before. 6
Until much of the laboratory’s work on inertial confinement fusion was declassified and published after the end of the cold war, it did not publically exist.
But the predicament of nuclear weapons scientists as authors extends beyond their inability to trade their knowledge, and thus to establish their reputations, outside the laboratory. Even within the laboratory establishing their reputations via written authorship can be complicated. This is because the laboratory’s knowledge economy mixes the characteristics of a common market with those of a medieval kingdom with many separate zones of barter, currency, and taxation. Traditionally nuclear weapons knowledge was recorded not so much in standardized and refereed articles, as it would be in conventional academic settings, but in reports detailing the results of nuclear tests, new ways of calculating opacities, and so on. These reports, instead of being codified into a uniformly accessible grid of knowledge, were often stored eccentrically. As one scientist described it:There was a mill for publishing the results of test shots, the latest methods for calculating opacities and so on. But there was no serious library for these reports in the early days. The reports would get thrown in a room, then someone would take one and hold on to it and that article would now be officially “misplaced.” (That’s why the GAO found that 10,000 secret documents were missing at Livermore. They’re not exactly lost. They’re not floating around outside the lab. They’re in people’s offices somewhere.) Old-timers would have safes full of documents inherited from someone else who retired ten years earlier. So, when they retired, you’d get those documents transferred to you, and that was a sort of library.
In other words, even within the laboratory, knowledge could be stored and exchanged in highly localized ways. The circulation of knowledge might be restricted by the semi-forgotten nature of a written report languishing in a colleague’s safe, by networks of friendship, or by the assumption that weapons scientists, for national security reasons, should not have access to too much secret information unless it was directly relevant to their work. 7
At its most extreme, the laboratory environment can unmake the very form of writing itself as a means of storing information, creating within one of the most high-tech environments in the world a partial return to the orality that preceded literacy and hence removing the very possibility of authorship in the modern writing-based conception of the term. Many scientists’ reputations rest not on written reports 8 but, rather on oral presentations they have given; on insightful questions in design review meetings; on huge craters their devices have inscribed upon the surface of the Nevada Desert; on an inventive idea they are locally remembered to have suggested and worked through; on a beautiful component they designed which was instantly vaporized by the very test whose success it enabled; and on a socially recognized knack for judgement–a feeling for the devices and how they will behave. Because so much weapons design knowledge is practical knowledge that is unwritten or is thought to be hermeneutic rather than purely factual in nature, it is seen as residing in the designers themselves. (For this reason the laboratory prohibits groups of designers from traveling together on the same plane, in case it crashes.) One of the older designers, Seymour Sack, was described to me as “a walking repository of 500 experiments [nuclear tests].” Some scientists worry that, as Peter put it:
There are so few people genuinely involved in design, you efficiently communicated by other means [than formal writing] . . . And the formal record suffers from this deficiency. While we have vaults containing the measured results of tests [as well as cutaways of nuclear devices showing their internal “anatomy”], the reason that certain choices were made are not obvious from the materials stored there. This information still exists as oral histories, but the content of this reservoir diminishes as the experience base drops.
Ironically, if Plato worried that the transition to literacy and the written documentation of information would destroy memory, contemporary weapons scientists worry, inversely, that their high-tech oral culture will prove the enemy of memory, as aging designers retire and die. They worry that not just their individual contributions but substantial parts of their science itself will die out in the absence–now that the testing ranges of the world have fallen silent–of the nuclear tests which, more than written documentation, have enabled the reproduction and transmission of their science. This science has been passed on by means that, in some ways, have more in common with medieval craft apprenticeships than the computerized bibliocentric mazeways of most scientific disciplines at the end of the twentieth century. 9
The years since the end of the cold war have seen increasing attempts to codify and document what the weapons scientists know and to bring the means by which their information is recorded into greater conformity with the practices of the outside world. This is a form of nuclear salvage work, thought it differs from the efforts of Rhodes and Holloway (discussed below) in that it is more interested in the formal codification of knowledge than in the individualization of its authors. Thus, in recent years, Livermore scientists have invested time in cataloguing reports and installing them in a central library and in making written or videotaped records of the reasons for specific design decisions. In 1989, the laboratory also started a peer-reviewed classified journal, modeled on those published by university scientists. This journal has not, however, done very well, partly because it runs counter to the comfortable orality of knowledge circulation long established among the weapons scientists. One scientist said the journal was “of little consequence.” Another described it as “a strung-out, thin sort of a thing, not conveniently available.” He said, “I never tried to publish in the journal because I thought it was pointless. Three people would read it, and then it would disappear forever.” He added (echoing the sentiments in the Djerassi quote with which this paper began) that the point of publishing is to have people who have not met you read about your work but, since his research can only be discussed within a small face-to-face community that already knows about his work, publication would be a futile waste of time.
Nuclear Salvage History
In 1945, after the revelation of the Atomic Bomb, it was Oppenheimer, the Director of the Los Alamos Laboratory and Life magazine’s Man of the Year, who received the credit for the bomb. This was despite the fact that the bomb was originally conceived by Leo Szilard, and the implosion mechanism–crucial in making the plutonium bomb work–was thought of by Seth Neddermeyer (a scientist who has long since disappeared into the oblivion of anonymity) and refined by Teller, Von Neumann and Kistiakowsky (Rhodes 1988).
Seven years later, after the first hydrogen bomb was tested, the media erroneously gave the credit to Edward Teller’s new laboratory at Livermore, and scientists at Los Alamos, furious to find their entire institution stripped of credit for its work, were prevented by national security regulations from correcting the error (York 1975, 13).
Edward Teller himself has been known for years as “the father of the H-Bomb,” even though the key design breakthrough is now widely credited to Stan Ulam, 10 and Teller largely withdrew from the project as it entered the engineering phase (Rhodes 1995). Disquiet among former colleagues at Teller’s popular identification as the inventor of the hydrogen bomb eventually impelled him, in 1955, to publish his Science article, “The Work of Many People,” in which he described the H-Bomb as “the work of many excellent people who had to give their best abilities for years and who were all essential for the final outcome.” He protested that “the story that is often presented to the public is quite different. One hears of a brilliant idea and only too often the name of a single individual is mentioned” (Teller 1955, 267). That individual was, of course, Teller himself and, although in his article he named the other people who were vital to the project, he was not permitted by security regulations to say what any of them actually did. Thus the article, paradoxically, has the effect of reinforcing the appearance of Teller’s singularity since, as lone author, he is arbitrator and custodian of others’ unknown contributions, which he authorizes.
We see in these examples how the secrecy characteristic of nuclear weapons research makes it difficult to certify the distinctive contributions of individuals, creating a situation where credit tends to gravitate towards those, such as Teller and Oppenheimer, who already have established scientific reputations or bureaucratic positions of authority. This gravitational tendency has been reinforced by the organizational dynamics of “big science” laboratories, such as Los Alamos and Livermore, where weapons science has been undertaken. In these large hierarchical science institutions intellectual value, or capital, tends to behave in the same way as material value in large capitalist institutions: it is extracted from those on the bottom, who create it through labor, accruing as wealth to those on the top. Thus in the large science laboratories the labor of a Seth Neddermeyer is transmuted into the reputation of a Robert Oppenheimer. 11
The last ten years have seen accelerating attempts by historians and other chroniclers of nuclear history to undo the Bourbakification of the inventors of the atomic and hydrogen bombs and to bestow secure identities and lines of credit on those scientists who, as their generation dies, stand between anonymity and immortality. I call this nuclear salvage history. Nuclear salvage history seeks to reverse the phenomenological death of the scientific authors of the first decade of the nuclear era just at the moment when their physical bodies are expiring. This project has been aided by the progressive declassification of the basic weapons design information and by the increasingly urgent desire of the pioneers of nuclear weapons science, now in their twilight years, to record their labors.
The leading practitioner of nuclear salvage history is the indefatigable Richard Rhodes, whose books The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb have exhaustively catalogued the personalities and contributions of the principal scientists in the first decade of nuclear weapons science. Rhodes’s history is resolutely middlebrow in the sense that it is the story, vividly told, of great men, each a miniature portrait in his own right, acting on the world to change history. 12
Rhodes’s books about weapons scientists are epics of invention in which he is deeply concerned with the documentation and demarcation of individual originality and creativity. Martha Woodmansee points out that the modern conception of authorship is “a by-product of the Romantic notion that significant writers break altogether with tradition to create something utterly new, unique–in a word, ‘original’” (Woodmansee 1994a, 16). This essentially Romantic trope of originality as an individual gift that strikes in world-changing flashes of inspiration is common in middlebrow science writing, where it resonates with high school textbook accounts of Archimedes’ and Newton’s discoveries, and it figures prominently in Rhodes’s accounts. Some of the most compelling passages in his books describe the exact moment of creative inspiration, which he hunts down with extraordinary determination. Take, for example, the cinematically vivid opening paragraph of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, in which he describes Leo Szilard’s sudden realization that it might be possible to construct an atomic bomb powered by a nuclear chain reaction:
In London, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Leo Szilard waited irritably one gray Depression morning for the stoplight to change. A trace of rain had fallen during the night; Tuesday, September 12, 1933 dawned cool, humid and dull. Drizzling rain would begin again in early afternoon. When Szilard told the story later he never mentioned his destination that morning. He may have had none; he often walked to think. In any case another destination intervened. The stoplight changed to green. Szilard stepped off the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death unto the world and all our woe, the shape of things to come. 13 (Rhodes 1988, 13)
The same trope recurs in Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, where Rhodes records Françoise Ulam’s memory of her husband’s breakthrough in the design of the hydrogen bomb with the same dramatic emphasis on one man’s destiny to change history:
Engraved on my memory is the day when I found him at noon staring intensely out of a window in our living room with a very strange expression on his face. Peering unseeing into the garden, he said, “I found a way to make it work.” “What work?” I asked. “The Super,” 14 he replied. “It is a totally different scheme and it will change the course of history.” (Rhodes 1995, 463) 15Juxtaposing such dramatic moments of inspiration with all the other contributions that brought nuclear weapons into being, Rhodes’s writing is also encyclopedic in impulse. Michel Foucault (1977, 147) has observed that the modern individualist idea of the author has a “classificatory function,” since the author’s “name permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them with others.” We see this classificatory function clearly in Rhodes’s books, which seek to demarcate the exact contribution made by each of the leading weapons scientists and to rank them. (He spends several pages, for example, discussing whether Ulam or Teller should get more credit for the hydrogen bomb.) In the process of this enormous accounting operation he salvages the contributions, formerly known to few, of those like Neddermeyer, saving them from their own premature authorial deaths, and he redefines the contributions of the manager-scientists, of whom Oppenheimer is the obvious exemplar. Oppenheimer’s brilliance is displaced in Rhodes’s account from scientific invention to recruitment, synthesis, and leadership. For example, Oppenheimer may not have thought of implosion, but he had, in Bethe’s words, “created the greatest school of theoretical physics the United States has ever known” (Rhodes 1988, 447), where Neddermeyer, who did think of implosion, was trained. But above all Oppenheimer managed and led. Rhodes summarizes his contribution to the Manhattan Project thus:
Robert Oppenheimer oversaw all this activity with self-evident competence and an outward composure that almost everyone came to depend upon. “Oppenheimer was probably the best lab director I have ever seen,” Teller repeats, “because of the great mobility of his mind, because of his successful effort to know about practically everything important invented in the laboratory, and also because of his unusual psychological insight into other people which, in the company of physicists was very much the exception.” “He knew and understood everything that went on in the laboratory,” Bethe concurs, “whether it was chemistry or theoretical physics or machine shop. He could keep it all in his head and coordinate it. It was clear also at Los Alamos that he was intellectually superior to us.” (Rhodes 1988, 570)
This evocation of the role of the manager in the big physics laboratories that emerged in mid-century is, incidentally, echoed in Zel’dovich’s comment about Oppenheimer’s Soviet counterpart, Yuli Khariton, who oversaw the construction of his country’s first atomic bomb. Zel’dovich told the young Sakharov, “There are secrets everywhere, and the less you know that doesn’t concern you, the better off you’ll be. Khariton has taken on the burden of knowing it all” (Holloway 1994, 202).
The Soviet bomb project has produced its own nuclear salvage history, the finest example of which is David Holloway’s Stalin and the Bomb. Unlike Rhodes, Holloway is a highbrow historian who situates his narrative in a broader historical context and uses it to illuminate the dynamics of Soviet society and of the cold war international system. However, like Rhodes, Holloway also seeks to discern the contributions made by specific individuals, to rank and compare them, and to mark what was original–though this turns out to be a troubling category. In producing this history Holloway faced two special problems. The first was the intense secretiveness of the Soviet state, which had rendered its own nuclear scientists even more anonymous and mysterious, more Bourbakified, than their counterparts in America. Thus, if Rhodes’s writing derives much of its power from his ability to show us vivid individual characters and richly textured narratives of scientific work behind Los Alamos’ veil of secrecy–to salvage the details of authorship from the well of anonymity–Holloway’s accomplishment in salvaging the details of the Russian nuclear story in a much more closed society must be judged still more extraordinary. 16
Holloway’s second difficulty was, in writing his own version of the nuclear epic, to establish the authority of scientists condemned to a repetition. The Soviet scientists were, after all, not only doing something that had already been done; they were, in the case of the atomic bomb at least, doing it with the aid of design information purloined from Los Alamos by the spy Klaus Fuchs. 17 As Martha Woodmansee (1994a) argues, while copying and embellishing the work of others used to be seen as a form of authorship in its own right in mediaeval Europe, in the context of contemporary copyright law and current ideologies of authorial individualism, copying is now seen as a highly degraded form of creativity. Thus the enterprise of establishing scientific authority in Holloway’s nuclear salvage history is enacted in circumstances that call for different, at times more defensive, narrative strategies than Rhodes’s. In Holloway’s account it is also clear that, given the discursive conjoining of science and nation-building in Soviet nationalist ideology, what is at stake in establishing the authorship of these weapons is not only the reputation of individual scientists but also the reputation of the nation these scientists represent.
As far as the atomic bomb is concerned, Holloway’s strategy is to remind us that Khariton could not be sure the purloined information was accurate, so that “Soviet scientists and engineers had to do all the same calculations and experiments” as their American counterparts (Holloway 1994, 199). He then details who did what where. As regards the hydrogen bomb, Holloway shows that the information Fuchs gave the Soviets about design efforts in the United States would have misled them since Los Alamos at this time was, under Teller’s guidance, pursuing a design strategy that turned out to be a blind alley. Holloway demonstrates that Sakharov and Zel’dovich followed their own design path, in many ways making quicker progress than their American counterparts and that, although the Americans were slightly ahead of the Soviets in creating a full-blown thermonuclear explosion, the Soviets were ahead in learning to use lithium deuteride–the key in making a deliverable bomb rather than an enormously unwieldy thermonuclear firecracker (Holloway 1994, ch. 14).
The stakes attached to originality (even if only the originality of a repetition) here are high, for individuals and nations. When Hirsh and Mathews published an article in 1990 in a fairly obscure American journal alleging that the Soviets had used fallout from the first American H-Bomb test in 1952 to deduce the design breakthrough made by Teller and Ulam,
. . . it caused some consternation among scientists who had taken part in the Soviet project. Khariton asked that a search be done of the files of those scientists who had been engaged in the detection and analysis of foreign nuclear tests. Nothing was found in those files to indicate that that useful information had been obtained from analysis of the Mike test. This was not because of self-denial. Sakharov and Viktor Davidenko collected cardboard boxes of new snow several days after the Mike test in the hope of analyzing the radioactive isotopes it contained for clues about the nature of the Mike test. One of the chemists at Arzamas-16 unfortunately poured the concentrate down the drain by mistake, before it could be analyzed. (Holloway 1994, 312)
Thus did the carelessness of a chemist save the honor of a nation.
The nuclear salvage history of Holloway and others has given names to the scientists behind the Soviet bomb, bestowed epic status on their labors, and enabled them to take their place as individuals in the Pantheon of science. In other words, it has saved them from Bourbakification in a way that is nicely evoked by the English physicist Stephen Hawking’s quip when he finally met Zel’dovich: “I’m surprised to see that you are one man, and not like Bourbaki” (Holloway 1994, 198). 18
Conclusion
Michel Foucault (1979) and Roland Barthes (1988) have both argued that what we recognize as authorship is a social institution that emerged at a particular historical moment defined by social individualism, scientific rationalism and, we might add, commodification. Over the last two centuries the ideology of authorship has tended to privilege written texts. These have been construed, through the lens of Romantic assumptions about individual creativity, as the products of unique individuals. Especially in the sciences, which Robert Merton (1942) long ago defined precisely in terms of their commitment to the universal circulation and accessibility of texts, these texts have circulated freely and have been collected in libraries that facilitated widespread access to them.
The Livermore Laboratory has developed a mode of scientific production partly at odds with these conventional notions of authorship. Although some knowledge circulates in formally authored texts, much of it circulates orally and informally. This knowledge is often produced in collaborative teams, so that individual intellectual production is not so highly fetishized as it is in academic circles where lead authorship and quantity of authorship is so vital a metric in tenure and promotion decisions. And, far from circulating freely, the written knowledge produced within the laboratory often cannot leave the laboratory (unless it is going to Los Alamos) and, even within the laboratory, may lie dormant in safes or travel eccentric routes of exchange marked by chains of friendship rather than being universally available.
In terms of the politics of authorship, it is hard to know what to make of this. Martha Woodmansee (1994b) has argued that the conventional ideology of authorship, which fetishizes the individual and commodifies texts through copyright laws, is a prison-house that inhibits collaborative creativity and forces us to misrecognize the degree to which all intellectual production is, no matter what the copyright lawyers say, inherently social and collaborative. In some ways scientists at Livermore might be said to have escaped this prison-house, liberated by the barbed wire fence around them. The knowledge they have produced largely circulates outside the commodified sphere of exchange regulated and constrained by copyright laws and the academic promotions treadmill. And many Livermore scientists, in a critique of academic culture that is increasingly resonant for this author, criticize the cult of individual assessment in the university and the emphasis in academia on stockpiling refereed articles as commodities, even if hardly anyone reads many of them. Many scientists told me they were attracted to work at Livermore precisely because it emphasized collaborative teamwork and did not force its scientists to publish or perish. As one weapons designer put it:
I find writing hard, and I don’t like the publish or perish business. It’s not that I don’t like pressure or hard work; I just like to impose my own deadlines rather than jump through other people’s hoops. The university is like the military the way it confines you and arranges everyone in hierarchies . . . I have more freedom at the lab (quoted in Gusterson 1996, 47-48).
On the other hand, these freedoms come at a price, since scientists may lose individual control over the products of their intellectual labor. These scientists may not be allowed to own copies of their own writings once they retire, may not be allowed to circulate their papers–even to name them–to friends, family, and colleagues beyond the barbed wire fence. Indeed, they could be prosecuted for discussing their own ideas with the wrong people, since their ideas belong to the state. Hence they cannot use their writings to build a public persona as authors conventionally do. Nor, until recently, could they earn royalties if they designed something patentable since the patent was awarded to the Department of Energy.
There are now signs, however, that, the end of the cold war is forcing a revision of authorship practices at the Livermore Laboratory. Just at the moment when it has lost nuclear testing, traditionally a means of consolidating and transmitting weapons design knowledge, the Laboratory is increasingly moving to formalize and codify its knowledge, cataloguing and centralizing reports, trying to transcribe oral knowledge, and establishing a peer-reviewed journal for weapons designers. In some ways the laboratory seems to be trying to bring about the (re)birth of the author.
But what are the limits of this (re)birth? Can it rupture the isolation of the laboratory and restore its weapons scientists to history, as Rhodes and Holloway have done for Ulam, Neddermeyer, Zel’dovich, and Altschuler? It may be that, unlike the contributions of Neddermeyer and Ulam, the work of today’s American weapons scientists lies beyond the retrieval techniques of nuclear salvage history. Working in teams on design tasks seen as routine rather than charismatic, their work shrouded in secrecy and only partly documented, these scientists, known as unique individuals by one another, may be condemned in the knowledge of the outside world to live outside history.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Babak Ashrafi, Mario Biagioli, Roberta Brawer, and Allison Macfarlane for directing me to reading and for clarifying in discussion some of the ideas in this paper. My thanks also to the four weapons scientists who answered my urgent email appeals for information on this subject.
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Endnotes:
Note 1: Djerassi, the inventor of the birth-control pill, has now completed a trilogy of what he calls “science-in-fiction” novels: novels that take scientists as their principal characters and explain the workings of science to the reader. Back.
Note 2: Measurement was a challenge, since the devices, buried underground with the measuring instruments, destroyed the measuring equipment a few nanoseconds after the commencement of the experiment. Back.
Note 3: “Peter” is a pseudonym. Ironically, anthropology’s conventional practice of shielding interviewees by giving them pseudonyms in this case becomes another way of killing the authors behind the barbed wire fence. Back.
Note 4: See Iglesias and Rogers (1996) and Rogers, Swenson, and Iglesias (1996). Back.
Note 5: The picture is, in fact, more complicated than this thumbnail sketch allows. Some weapons scientists lead a double life, finding ways to publish in the open literature at the same time as they do their weapons work. This enables them to build intellectual capital and authorial profiles outside the laboratory perimeter in a way that makes them potentially mobile in the scientific job and knowledge markets. Back.
Note 6: The Soviets did not classify Inertial Confinement Fusion research to the same degree as the Americans. This could lead to curious situations such as one at a conference in the 1980s where Livermore fusion researchers were embarrassed that Russian scientists were openly presenting the results of their fusion experiments to an audience that included many Americans without security clearances—even though the rationale for hiding such knowledge from the uncleared was that they might share it with the Russians! Back.
Note 7: It was widely believed in the 1980s by weapons designers in A and B Divisions, the two main weapons design divisions, that O Group, a breakaway group of designers ultimately protected by Edward Teller’s patronage, manipulated secrecy regulations to protect its work from peer review. O Group was working on, among other things, a nuclear bomb-pumped X-ray laser that was highly controversial both technically and politically. Many weapons scientists complained that they suspected O Group’s science was not rigorous, but could not evaluate it because of special levels of classification placed on its reports and briefings. Back.
Note 8: One interesting example here is Bruce Tartar, the current director of the laboratory. One scientist told me that, curious to know more about his director’s scientific career before he became director of the laboratory, he had tried to find what he had written about, but was unable to find a single report or article by him listed anywhere. Back.
Note 9: This has led MacKenzie and Spinardi (1995) to argue that, in the absence of nuclear testing, advanced nuclear weapons design knowledge might more or less fade away. Back.
Note 10: Ulam thought of making the hydrogen bomb a two-stage device in which the first stage (a fission bomb) would be used to compress, not just ignite, fuel in the secondary. Teller later thought of using radiation rather than neutrons from the atomic bomb to achieve compression (Rhodes 1995, ch. 23). Some weapons scientists have joked that Ulam “inseminated” Teller with the idea and that Teller is in fact the “mother of the H-Bomb” (Easlea 1983). Back.
Note 11: For more on the dynamics of big science, see Galison and Hevly (1992) and Galison (1997). Back.
Note 12: This approach also characterizes the biographies of two of the great Manhattan Project scientists: Lanouette’s (1992) biography of Leo Szilard and Gleick’s (1992) biography of Richard Feynman which, even in their titles (Genius and Genius in the Shadows) focus on the creativity and uniqueness of their subjects. As the literary theorist David Lodge has observed, commenting on the imper-viousness of biography to new literary theories that decenter the subject, “literary biography thus constitutes the most conservative branch of academic literary scholarship today. By the same token, it is the one that remains most accessible to the ‘general reader’” (Lodge 1996, 99). Back.
Note 13: Rhodes subsequently revealed the extraordinary labor that went into the research and writing of this paragraph. He had to visit London to see the intersection for himself, and he research London weather records so that he could evoke the physical setting for Szilard’s inspiration as precisely as possible. Back.
Note 14: The “Super” was the hydrogen bomb. Back.
Note 15: Rhodes tries to trace the exact moment of Neddermeyer’s conception of implosion in the same way, but ultimately has to content himself with a more speculative discussion of the exact origin of the idea:
Neddermeyer could not quite remember after the war the complex integrations by which he came to it [implosion]. An ordnance expert had been lecturing. The expert had quibbled at the physicists’ use of the word “explosion” to describe firing bomb parts together. The proper word, the expert said, was “implosion.” During Serber’s lectures Neddermeyer had already been thinking about what must happen when a heavy cylinder of metal is fired into a blind hole in an even heavier metal sphere. Spheres and shock waves made him think about spherically symmetrical shock waves, whatever those might be. “I remember thinking of trying to push in a shell of material against a plastic flow,” Neddermeyer told an interviewer later, “and I calculated the minimum pressures that would have to be applied. Then I happened to recall a crazy thing somebody had published about firing bullets against each other. It may have been a picture of two bullets liquefied on impact. That is what I was thinking when the ballistics man mentioned implosion.” (Rhodes 1988, 466)
If Rhodes’s books use, wherever possible, the trope of sudden inspiration to narrate the origins of America’s first and second generation nuclear weapons, it is interesting that William Broad’s (1985) account of the stillborn genesis of third generation nuclear weapons at the Livermore Laboratory in the 1980s contains exactly the same literary device in its description of Peter Hagelstein’s sudden envisioning of a design for the X-ray laser at a review meeting where he was in a mystical state induced by sleep-deprivation. For a playwright’s use of exactly the same literary device, this time to evoke Alan Turing’s breakthrough in cracking the Nazi Enigma code during World War II, see Whitemore (1996). Back.
Note 16: This is to speak as if Holloway wrote only about the Soviet scientists and Rhodes only about the Americans. In fact, substantial portions of Rhodes’s Dark Sun narrate the Soviet bomb project as well. However, Rhodes, who does not speak Russian, was at a disadvantage researching the Russian side of the story, and these parts of the book are generally considered to be weak, even mis-leading in parts. Back.
Note 17: In the early 1990s this became a matter of some controversy in Russia as the intelligence services and veteran scientists of the original Soviet atomic bomb project feuded over who should get most credit for the first Soviet nuclear test: the spies who obtained the design for America’s first pluto-nium bomb or the scientists who figured out how to build it. Back.
Note 18: Hawking meant by this that Zel’dovich seemed to have accomplished too much for one man. The admiration for Zel’dovich, and the sense of him as a great scientist, is also conveyed in a story told to me by a scientist at the Livermore Laboratory: when the Princeton physicist John Wheeler, who had worked on the American hydrogen bomb, finally met Zel’dovich, he presented him with a salt and pepper shaker, one male and one female in shape. Alluding to the greater elegance of the first Soviet H-Bomb design compared to its American counterpart, he said that the male represented Zel’dovich and the female Teller. Back.
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