Smyth’s Report Drew Secrecy Lines and Was Not Misinformation

In regard to Elyse Graham ’07’s “How the First Historian of the A-Bomb Achieved a Misinformation Coup” (September issue), Princeton professor Henry DeWolf Smyth *1921’s September 1945 report, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, published by the U.S. government weeks after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and later republished by Princeton University Press and then Stanford University Press, was not misinformation!

As Gen. Groves, who managed the Manhattan Project for the Army, said in his preface, the report’s purpose was to publish “[a]ll pertinent scientific information which can be released to the public at this time without violating the needs of national security … . Persons disclosing or securing additional information by any means whatsoever without authorization are subject to severe penalties under the Espionage Act.”

The purpose of Smyth’s report was to make clear to those who had worked in the Manhattan Project and to journalists where the secrecy lines were drawn. Those lines were drawn based on judgments that it would be impossible to maintain secrecy about “basic scientific knowledge” or basic information about the big industrial projects that had been built around the tasks of plutonium production and uranium enrichment. The information the report contained was accurate.

Other countries interested in acquiring nuclear weapons found the report pedagogically useful but had to fill in the details themselves. In the case of the Soviet Union, the design of the Nagasaki weapon was supplied by Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall, ideologically motivated spies who felt that it would be too dangerous for the U.S. to have a monopoly on nuclear weapons. The Soviet nuclear weapon designers, in fear of being executed if their first test failed, tested the Nagasaki design before testing their own designs (see Michael D. Gordin’s 2009 book, Red Cloud at Dawn).

Editor’s note: The author is a professor of public and international affairs and senior research physicist emeritus in Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security.