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Restricted Data
24  juillet     12h57
Henry Stimson didn’t go to Kyoto on his honeymoon
Alex Wellerstein    The city of Kyoto was the only great city of Japan to be spared serious bombing during World War II, despite being among the top targets preferred for the atomic bomb, thanks to the unprecedented and extraordinary efforts by the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, to protect it. I have written at...
16  juin     20h14
Deconstructing The Doomsday Machine Part 1: The Question of Memory
Alex Wellerstein    When I learned several months ago that Daniel Ellsberg had pancreatic cancer, and was opting not to treat it, I was not quite sure what I ought to do. I consider it a great honor that I got to spend several days with Ellsberg, a few years back, and was periodically in touch with him
21  décembre     18h03
Oppenheimer: Vacated but not Vindicated
Alex Wellerstein    One of the sleeper news items of last week was that the Department of Energy officially vacated the Atomic Energy Commission decision that stripped J. Robert Oppenheimer of his security clearance in . It did come as a surprise to me. I knew that there was a campaign to overturn Oppenheimer’s...
06  mai     16h25
Did the Japanese offer to surrender before Hiroshima? (Part 2)
Alex Wellerstein    This is second post of a two part series on this topic. Click here for part one. Did the Japanese offer to surrender before the atomic bombs were dropped in August In my first post earlier this week, I gave what we might call the standard diplomatic history answer: no, they didn’t. There were...
02  mai     14h59
Did the Japanese offer to surrender before Hiroshima? (Part 1)
Alex Wellerstein    This is part one of a series of two posts on this topic. Click here for part two. One of the most common invocations made in the service of the atomic bombs weren’t necessary argument is that the Japanese offered to surrender well before Hiroshima, and that this was ignored by the United States...
09  avril     16h48
NUKEMAP and the Ukraine-Russia war (so far)
Alex Wellerstein    In early February , as readers will have seen, I celebrated the tenth anniversary of the NUKEMAP. Privately, I had been reflecting personally on how the usage stats had been lower since the end of the Trump presidency. My feelings about the NUKEMAP usage stats are always a bit conflicted, since...
03  février     20h48
10 years of NUKEMAP
Alex Wellerstein    I was somewhat surprised to realize that today is the th 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. The most disturbing effect of the passing of time with...
19  novembre     14h08
Surely You’re Joking, Comrade Beria
Alex Wellerstein    In my recent article on the occasion of the th 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,...
12  novembre     19h41
How many people have Q Clearance?
Alex Wellerstein    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 ...
07  novembre     17h44
A decade of Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog
Alex Wellerstein    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