Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771
ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM
Monday, April 7, 2014 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium
Alex Wellerstein
"John Wheeler's H-bomb Blues: Searching for a Missing Document in the High Cold War"
ABSTRACT -- There's never a right time to lose a secret document under unusual circumstances. But for the influential American physicist John Archibald Wheeler, there might not have been a worse time than January, 1953. While on an overnight train ride to Washington, D.C., only a month after the test of the first hydrogen bomb prototype, Wheeler lost, under curious circumstances, a document explaining the secret to making thermonuclear weapons. The subsequent search for the missing pages (and for who to blame) went as high as J. Edgar Hoover and President Eisenhower, and ended up destroying several careers. The story provides a unique window into the precarious intersection of government secrecy, competing histories of the hydrogen bomb, and inter-agency atomic rivalry in the high Cold War. Using recently declassified files, I will trace out the tale of how Wheeler ended up on that particular train, with that particular document, and the far-reaching consequences of its loss - or theft - for both Wheeler and others involved in the case.
SPEAKER -- Alex Wellerstein is an Associate Historian at the Center for History of Physics, at the American Institute of Physics. He is also currently teaching a course in the History Department at Georgetown University. He received a Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University in 2010. He is in the process of completing a book on the history of nuclear secrecy in the United States, from the Manhattan Project through the "War on Terror." He also maintains Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog, and is the creator of the NUKEMAP web application.
Colloquium Committee Sponsor: David G. Simpson,
Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov