Restricted Data contains numerous illustrations and photographs, but of course there were far more than could be justifiably included in the book. Below are images (most of which are not in the book) that relate to the history of nuclear secrecy told in the book. They are listed in a roughly chronological order based on their subject matter (not necessarily when the photograph was taken).
Copyright status is noted after each caption in brackets — anything labeled as NARA or Los Alamos is in the public domain, anything labeled as “Author” or “Used with Permission” will require copyright clearance to re-use (feel free to get in contact).
These sorts of stamps are something of a totem, the visual representation that most people associate with secrecy. In the process of researching this book, I saw many of them, and photographed some of the more vivid ones. Click here for a sub-page devoted exclusively to these photos. [NARA/Author]The 300 area at Hanford, in which plutonium metal was fabricated, as well as general administrative functions took place. An extensive system of physical fences, barbed wire, and gates can be seen. One can just make out, on the water tower at far left, the writing: “SILENCE MEANS SECURITY.” [Hanford/DOE]The improbable William Laurence, the science-reporter-turned-embedded-reporter for the Manhattan Project. Laurence is such a strange, fascinating, controversial figure (whom I talk about at length in the book with regards to his connection to the “Publicity” program of the Manhattan Project). I have always been impressed in his appearance, as well — he looks like someone out of another era, transported into a new, atomic age. [Los Alamos]This is one of a series of photographs showing the loading of the first atomic bombs into their planes for use against Japan. This one is the Fat Man bomb that was ultimately dropped on Nagasaki. I find its being cloaked so visually symbolic — it was still a secret, even though Hiroshima had already been destroyed, and the goal was to keep too many people even on the island of Tinian from seeing its exact shape. The exact shapes of the first two atomic bombs were classified until 1960. [NARA]At the end of the Manhattan Project, participants who had been with the project for a number of years were given various small pins that were struck to commemorate their service. This silver one was the most common, and one can find them for sale periodically today — they are not all that rare, given that hundreds of thousands of Americans took part in the project. This one is from my own collection. Aside from its graphical appeal, I find it an interesting phenomena: how many other governments strike commemorative pins for the thousands of workers who participated in a once Top-Secret project? [Author]This remarkable image is part a fuzing manual for the Mark III atomic bomb (the postwar version of the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki), that John Coster-Mullen received via a Freedom of Information Act Request and sent to me. It is part of the cover art of the book, and a remarkable illustration of how “snug” the pieces of the bomb fit together. This image gives away nothing at all that is secret today (and indeed, little that would have been secret after about 1960, when the casing of the bomb was declassified), but it still gives one a frission to have a see-through image of an atomic bomb. I know of no other similar image that the United States has ever released. [Los Alamos]As the book discusses, nuclear weapons are not always complicit in their own secrecy, especially once you detonate them. This strange speckled piece of emulsion paper is perhaps the earliest example of this: the small black stars one sees on it are part of the radioactive signature of the Trinity test. This film was part of a batch of sensitive X-ray film produced by Kodak that was discovered to have been fouled by fallout from the Trinity test. This particular film was sent to General Groves, who had it forwarded to Robert Oppenheimer. [NARA]A rare color photograph of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves, for the ceremony awarding Los Alamos the “Army E” award for excellence after the end of World War II. Standing with them is Robert Sproul, President of the University of California, which was the official contractor for the Los Alamos laboratory. Sproul got into trouble during the war for blabbing in a speech about how important the UC’s work was to develop weapons to end the war, although ironically he had no idea exactly what it was they were doing. [Los Alamos]
The above three images show a lucite hemisphere created by Norman Brown after World War II in the same mold in which he cast the plutonium hemispheres used in the Trinity “Gadget.” Brown brought this with him to a Manhattan Project historical event run by the Atomic Heritage Foundation in 2015, only a few months before he passed away. Embedded in the lucite are pieces of Trinitite. One can see the internal dimple left for the neutron initiator. The hand at left is mine; at right, you can see an excited John Coster-Mullen tracing its diameter. It is slightly smaller than the bomb core, possibly as a result of material differences between plutonium and lucite, or outgassing over time. This is a Department of Energy censor’s nightmare, that a scientist working on a bomb project would make a classified keepsake and keep it, uncontrolled, for 70 years. [Author]
A large part of the mystique of the Manhattan Project’s secrecy was spread by the Manhattan Project itself in the postwar, as part of their “Publicity campaign. This photograph from the Saturday Evening Post shows Bob Consodine — an Army lawyer who helped work on the “Publicity” campaign — dramatically posed in front of a large SECRET sign, and the accompanying story told of the great efforts that had been gone to to ensure the secret of the bomb. The fact that there were many significant leaks and disclosures was not mentioned, nor was the fact — then unknown to them — that the project had been penetrated by Soviet spies. [Saturday Evening Post]This is easily my favorite photograph from the Soviet atomic bomb project. It shows a worker and a prototype casing for their bomb. Like the United States, they no doubt spent considerable time working out the ballistics of such an unwieldy weapon that, because of its internal complexity, could not be made to rotate too quickly or anything too disruptive. What I appreciate about the photograph is its steampunk like quality, with a man straight out of Golgol next to what looks like a home-made nuclear weapon. [RosAtom]In 1950, Hans Bethe wrote an article for Scientific American on the hydrogen bomb that ultimately was partially censored by the Atomic Energy Commission. (The book describes the episode and its meaning at length.) This is one of the pages of Bethe’s draft that was in the AEC records, with the marks of the censor present on it in red pencil. Carefully looking at such annotations — especially the minor notes made with a pencil — can help one get inside the mind of the censor, decades later. [NARA]David Greenglass’s “sketch of the very atomic bomb itself,” as the prosecutor described it to the audience and jury at the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. This particular drawing, “Exhibit 8,” was drawn by Greenglass just before the trial to illustrate the most damning informtion he passed on to Rosenberg—a cross-section of the Nagasaki implosion-style atomic bomb. The “implosion” design shown here was still classified, but the Atomic Energy Commission agreed to allow it to be declassified in court to help prove their case. At the conclusion of Greenglass’s testimony, the Rosenberg’s lawyer moved to have “Exhibit 8” impounded, claiming he was worried about the national security implications for its public release. So the implosion secret was out—and described in national newspapers the next day—but the actual picture shown to reporters was effectively secret, until its release was petitioned in 1966, and it was derided by experts as a “caricature” of an actual blueprint for a bomb. I enjoy the historical complexity of the image: it simultaneously advertises itself to be (and looks like) what we imagine a “nuclear secret” would be, but it is actually quite erroneous in many ways, and would not be very useful to an actual weapon designer. It is incorporated into the cover of the book for these multiple reasons. [NARA]If you research nuclear weapons, you see a lot of photographs of mushroom clouds and nuclear fireballs. It is the rare one that makes me really sit up and pay attention these days. This is one of my all-time favorites, if one is allowed to have a “favorite” mushroom cloud without it being in too bad taste. This is Shot Item of Operation Greenhouse (1951), the first test of a fusion-boosted fission bomb. What appeals to me are two aspects. First, the colors: the turquoise tint of the fireball is part of the original photograph I scanned by hand at NARA, and not an edit. It gives one a glimpse of its cosmic unworldliness. Second, the fact that the clouds seem to be forming a natural question mark, with the bomb posing the question of what comes next. [NARA]A page from the only recently released Un-redacted Oppenheimer Security Hearing transcript from 1954. This particular section redacts a long passage on the development of the Teller-Ulam hydrogen bomb design. Ulam’s name was almost totally (but not entirely) removed from the transcript, sometimes very deliberately and specifically. The orange pencil shows the mark of the censor, as does the “Delete, JB” (James Beckerley) on the right. I discovered these files — mislaid in the National Archive system for decades — while researching the book. [NARA]It was 15 years after the atomic bombings of Japan that photographs of the bomb casings were finally declassified. Newsweek took the opportunity to superimpose upon them simplified drawings of what the internal workings of the bombs were thought to be. This motif has been copied and recopied for decades since, but this is the first instance of it that I found. [Newsweek]Secrecy is frequently talked about in metaphorical terms, like “leaks” and “walls” and “shadows” and so on. The book probes these metaphors and tries to find ways of talking about secrecy that get beyond them. This particular image, though, is an internal representation of the “information is a liquid” metaphor. It was created internally to the Atomic Energy Commission in 1965, and shows the ways in which Restricted Data is an category in and of itself relative to other kinds of secret information, as well as indicating the ways in which information can be removed (via declassification actions) from the Restricted Data category. The “FRD” category is “Formerly Restricted Data” and, despite its name, is clearly and correctly indicated as still be a category of classification. [NARA]Two wild characters from Chapter 7 of the book: Keeve M. Siegel and Keith Brueckner, the gambler and the mountain-climber. Brueckner and Siegel’s attempt to commercialize the Teller-Ulam design, through their joint effort in developing private laser fusion, caused an uproar within the AEC. I was fortunate-enough to interview Brueckner before he passed away. These photos come from an article on KMS Fusion in Fortune magazine, just before their downfall in 1974. [Fortune]The censor at work: Charles L. Marshall, AEC Director of Classification, declassifying a document as part of the AEC’s 1971-1976 “declassification drive.” These periodic attempts to reduce the volume of classified documents occasionally resulted in actual secrets being released, leading to a backlash. [DOE]The cover page for John Aristotle Phillip’s junior thesis, “The Fundamentals of Atomic Bomb Design: An Assessment of the Problems and Possibilities Confronting a Terrorist Group or Non-Nuclear Nation Attempting to Design A Crude Pu-239 Fission Bomb,” May 1976. Phillips thesis was kept under lock-and-key by Princeton University after it was filed, on the recommendation of his advisor, Freeman Dyson, but news that an undergraduate could design an atomic bomb based on open-source information spread quickly, and widely. [John Aristotle Phillips]In the late 1970s, “draw the bomb” activism became a way for disenfranchised groups to show that they too, in a small but perhaps meaningful way, had access to the tremendous power associate with state militaries, even if they were only graphical in nature. This is my favorite example of this, from 1978: Majority Report, a “radical feminist” newspaper, giving a tongue-in-cheek account of an atomic bomb design that one could fit inside a coffee can, with high explosives pressed with a copy of the Joy of Cooking. It’s a joke, but it’s only half a joke: they’re coopting some of the power of “the secret” by showing that, by the late 1970s, it no longer was one. [Copyright status unclear]Howard Morland, and his tale of unearthing the “secret of the hydrogen bomb,” occupies a considerable amount of Chapter 8 of the book. On the left is Morland and his physical H-bomb model (with a soccer ball for the primary, and a softball for the core), as photographed for the Washington Post in 1981 (at the time his book account of the Progressive case, The Secret that Exploded, was published). At right is Morland and me at a friend’s party in Washington, DC, just before I moved to the New York area in 2014. He is wearing his H-bomb secret shirt he had made in 1979, which I discuss in the book. I felt very honored both to see the original shirt and to see the pose he imagined he might do with it before the press, to reveal the secret to the world. [Washington Post/Author]This image, from Chuck Hansen’s Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History (1988), is what got me thinking about nuclear secrecy in a serious way for the first time. How was it made? How much of it was real, and how much of it was speculation? Could you regard it as the end-product of a long process of secrets being leaked, or released, and finally being assembled into a coherent whole? In Chapter 8 of the book, I finally come to the answer of these questions that I first had when I was a young student, from both the perspective of declassification history and having tracked down the artist (Mike Wagnon) and Hansen’s own notes. [Eleanor Hansen]The casing of an early hydrogen bomb (Mk-14), discarded in a classified landfill in the 1950s, was unearthed after the Cold War had ended and put in a museum in the 1990s. I find this excavation of the nuclear past — and its role in the continuance into the nuclear present — remarkably symbolic. [DOE]An obligatory “the author and the bomb” photograph. The bomb a casing for an Mk-17 hydrogen bomb, at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in Albuquerque, New Mexico. [Author]
