John Wheeler's H-bomb blues: Searching for a missing document at the height of the Cold War

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, the AIP Center for History of Physics' outgoing Associate Historian 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.