How the First Historian of the A-Bomb Achieved a Misinformation Coup

Eighty years ago, on Sept. 15, 1945 — just weeks after atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands and bringing an end to World War II — Princeton University Press published a 280-page book that explained, in painstaking detail, how the bombs were made. This was the answer to exactly the question that everyone was asking, and the book, which was written by the chair of Princeton’s physics department, Henry DeWolf Smyth *1921, became an instant bestseller.

The press was able to bring out the book so astoundingly quickly for one reason, and one reason only: The book was an intelligence operation, conceived by the U.S. government during the development of the bomb to shape how the public understood the bomb — and specifically, to make it harder for other countries to build one.

It succeeded. In fact, it was a misinformation campaign so successful that we still tell its falsified story about the bomb today.

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Henry DeWolf Smyth *1921

Daniel Hertzberg

Smyth’s adventure in wartime intelligence started in early 1945, when Vannevar Bush, a top science official coordinating U.S. war research, called him into a meeting in Washington and gave him an unusual assignment. Bush knew that work in Los Alamos was progressing so well that, before the year was out, the bomb would be ready to drop — and that when it did, the world would clamor to know everything about it. Which meant the U.S. had the opportunity to release an official version of that story before anyone else, a version that would serve U.S. interests. As the historian Rebecca Schwartz *08 has shown in a brilliant study, Bush asked Smyth to write the definitive book about the weapon that would end the war, while guarding the secret that such a weapon was being developed in the first place. Smyth accepted.

Throughout that spring, Smyth spent his days writing the book in his office in Palmer Hall. While he worked, War Department guards sat in the hallway, reading detective magazines; when he left for the day, they made sure he locked his papers in a safe, then remained in his office to guard the safe. (“They did keep people from interrupting me, though,” he later told The New Yorker wistfully. “Sometimes I wish I had them back.”)

Smyth, a theoretician who wore tweed with elbow patches, was perfect for the job because he was working as a consultant for the Manhattan Project, which meant he had the requisite security classifications and understood the science. The son of a Princeton professor, he took three of his four degrees at the University, then returned there as a professor who specialized in atomic physics. After the U.S. joined the war, he became the associate director for the Met Lab until it proved impossible to keep up his work as department chair while commuting to Chicago, whereupon he switched to the role of consultant. For some of the research projects he was involved in, security protocols prohibited any communication between the groups. “I was in the position of not being legally allowed to talk to myself,” he quipped.

In June, Datus Smith 1929, the director of Princeton University Press, received a call from Smyth with a strange query. Would he rent the Press’s publishing plant to the U.S. government for two weeks? Just the plant, not the printers; the book the government wanted to print, in an edition of 5,000 copies, would have a Top Secret classification, and the printers didn’t have clearance.

“Gosh, Harry, do you really mean that?” Smith asked. “It sounds crazy to print 5,000 copies of a Top Secret item.”

Smyth replied, “Well, I suppose it might be one of those funny instances where something is Top Secret one day and in newspaper headlines the next.” 

Smith, deciding the logistics were too difficult, turned Smyth down. Then, on Aug. 12, while Smith was on a beach vacation with his family, he suddenly realized the professor’s strange call must have been about the atomic bomb, which was now all over the headlines. He called Smyth from a phone booth in wet swimming trunks, got an agreement for a same-day meeting, thumbed a ride so his wife could keep their car, and was in Princeton talking to Smyth that evening.

When the Press brought out the book in September, after the world’s hastiest copy editing all-nighters, the edition they produced was 60,000 books, which sold out on the day of publication. Printing after printing, it kept selling out; it flew to the top of bestseller lists, with translations appearing in French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, and other languages.

Smyth didn’t make money from the book, since it was — formally speaking — written as a government report for the War Department. Princeton University Press, on the other hand, made more than $25,000 within the year — almost half a million dollars today. The book actually cost Smyth money, since he paid $2 as a copyright fee to allow anyone to reproduce the text in full —which was desirable, of course, because the goal was to get the text shared as widely as possible. 

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Titled Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, Smyth’s book was brilliantly misleading for the following reason. It focused almost entirely on the work of physicists. In reality, the physics of building the bomb was relatively simple. The real challenge was to make the bomb detonate and sustain fission while doing so — which required chemistry, engineering, metallurgy, mining, and other specialties he largely left out of the narrative.

Few readers, if any, noticed that the book strategically withheld information. In fact, some accused Smyth of sharing so much information that he endangered national security. Perfect.

To this day, the story in the Smyth Report, as it was popularly called, is the story we tell about the bomb. We call World War II “the physicists’ war”; we watch films like Oppenheimer, in which a tiny clutch of wild-haired physicists seem to build the bomb simply by piecing together atoms. It’s a story that leaves out most of the people whose skills made that impossible weapon possible — from the metallurgists who refined plutonium to the women who worked as computers on the bomb’s mathematical modeling to John Johnson Gutierrez — a “factotum and jack-of-all-trades," according to mathematician Stanislaw Ulam — whose name, Los Alamos alums later recalled, was the one heard most frequently over the public address system. (Technicians know things about a research lab that the lab couldn’t run without, but which the researchers themselves never need to know.)

“I suppose Princeton can be given the dubious honor of being the birthplace of the Atomic Age,” the physicist Philip Anderson wrote in 1985. He was referring to the usual suspects — Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Oppenheimer himself — but also Smyth, who crafted the defining myth of the Atomic Age. That we don’t think of it as a myth — that we think of it, simply, as what happened — is a testament to the power historians themselves have over history. In the right hands, a story can be as potent a weapon as a bomb.