Alex Wellerstein is a historian of nuclear weapons, whose most widely known work is a web-based nuclear weapons effects simulator called NUKEMAP that he first developed as a postdoctoral historian here at AIP. His first book, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States, explored the development and implementation of security restrictions surrounding nuclear knowledge. His second book was released in December, The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age.

The Most Awful Responsibility makes a series of new assertions relating to President Harry Truman’s relationship with atomic weapons, tracking that relationship from Truman’s assumption of the presidency during the last phases of World War II up through the Korean War and the development of the hydrogen bomb. Of particular significance, Alex argues, first, that Truman came to understand that Hiroshima was a city rather than a military installation only after it was bombed, and, second, that he had no forewarning that a second bomb would be dropped at all. In the wake of these surprises, Truman developed a deep aversion to the use of atomic weapons and immediately insisted on maintaining strong presidential control over them, setting crucial precedents for US nuclear weapons policy.

Alex has summarized his arguments in more depth at his blog. Here we’ve asked him some questions by email about the craft of nuclear history.

---

Will Thomas: I feel like we’ve had an implicit presumption that for something as important as the atomic bomb, Truman must have been briefed in detail about how it would be used. How did you come to suspect, and how did you ultimately convince yourself, that that simply wasn’t the case?

Alex Wellerstein: The document that really made me come around to this idea was Truman’s “Potsdam Journal” entry about the “decision” to use the atomic bomb, where he wrote that he and Secretary of War Henry Stimson had decided that “military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children,” and that “the target will be a purely military one.” I had undoubtedly seen this many times before, like anyone working on this topic, but I was coming to it from the perspective of the decision to spare Kyoto, which was the context for this “decision.” I gradually came around to the idea that Truman’s “journal” reflected his understanding of the conversation that he and Stimson had had about Kyoto, and that it made more sense to assume that it accurately reflected what Truman thought had been decided, rather than to assume that Truman was being in some way misleading in what he was writing down.

This in turn led me to look over every other documented interaction Truman had regarding the atomic bomb planning, and to just not take for granted that there were interactions that were not in evidence in the documentary record. There undoubtedly were some—the documentary record isn’t perfect—but my suspicion is that historians have frequently filled the “gaps” with what would make sense in retrospect. There’s a logic to that, to be sure, but you have to get the context completely right for that to work. As an example that I think people would find surprising, I have not seen any contemporary evidence that Truman even saw the final atomic strike order, even though most historians assume that he must have been shown it. That assumption would make sense if you assumed Truman was looped into “operational” aspects of the bombing, but the bulk of the evidence that I’ve looked at suggests he really wasn’t, and that the people who actually approved the strike order (Stimson and General George C. Marshall) would not necessarily have thought that Truman wanted or needed to see it.

Thomas: Historians of science are used to thinking critically about knowledge and how it functions. As someone with that background, do you think that gives you a certain advantage, or at least a different vantage point, when working in the realm of political history?

Wellerstein: I think it is a fair generalization to say that historians of science are somewhat obsessed with epistemology and the conditions for knowledge. We are also quite used to dealing with situations of partial knowledge, where it is hard to say exactly when some particular concept really crystallized or not. The classic example, in Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is about when oxygen was truly discovered, and I think about that a lot. Kuhn argues that there wasn’t a single moment in which oxygen was discovered, and that instead its “discovery” was a somewhat vague and smeared event that only afterwards can be understood as having occurred. My sense is that quite a lot of knowledge works that way: in retrospect, it is obvious that something is “known,” but at the time, there are multiple, overlapping interpretations, understandings, half-understandings, misunderstandings, uncertainty, confusion, and so on.

Historians of science are quite used to thinking about knowledge this way, as a non-binary state, but my perception is that diplomatic historians tend to treat knowledge as a more concrete and definite thing, that someone either knows something or they don’t.

I am also “postmodern” enough to not believe that there is any final word likely to be found to some of these questions. There are just interpretations. Some are more compelling than others to different people and at different times. I try to be very explicit about the moments in which I feel I am making an interpretive leap, and I also try to address counter-indicative evidence that I find. This is the kind of approach that is not at all unheard of in science studies, but the discipline of diplomatic history is at least much more rhetorically committed to a “just the facts” approach to writing history, which I find more misleading than not about the epistemic status of the work.

Thomas: Conversely, for us historians of science, do you think we tend to focus too much on nuclear history in terms of laboratories and scientist-advisers, perhaps at the expense of examining decision-makers like Truman as thinkers in their own right?

Wellerstein: We definitely have a disciplinary bias towards making scientists the center of our stories, for quite obvious reasons. It is a tricky thing for me. Is The Most Awful Responsibility even a book in the history of science? I have wondered this quite a bit myself. There are a few scientists in it—Oppenheimer shows up here and there, as you’d imagine—but it’s really mostly about non-scientists. At the same time, I think it is very much the kind of book that perhaps only a historian of science would write.

There are practical consequences of this kind of siloing, of course. I could easily imagine historians of science looking at book prizes thinking, “this isn’t history of science,” just as I could imagine diplomatic historians saying, “this isn’t diplomatic history.” You could imagine writing the book in many different ways, to appeal to different kinds of audiences—scholarly or general—but I tried to write it in the way that appealed primarily to me, for better or worse.

Thomas: At a more general level, nuclear history has a deep literature and is crowded with very knowledgeable experts. Can you offer any views into how you manage to come up with fresh insights and avoid falling into the grooves of well-worn narratives?

Wellerstein: I admit that I much prefer primary sources over secondary sources. It is not that I do not appreciate the work of other historians—obviously I do—but when it comes to a topic that I’m digging into, I much prefer to try and work it out for myself first. So I spend most of my time trying to reconstruct a narrative and interpretation from fragmentary sources, and only then go back to see how other historians have dealt with the same problem. Conversely, if it is an area where I don’t have extensive archival experience and the possible archives are vast, like with the Korean War sections of the book, I do start from the secondary sources, but mostly as a guide to the locations of primary sources. I try to check every single primary source to see if it actually says what it has been quoted as saying. This is particularly the case for pioneering works produced in the 1980s and 1990s, when the access to these sources was still fresh and new, but when there was far less available to contextualize them with. I have no disrespect for those scholars, but I’ve found that a lot of works from this period just get cited and re-cited without any clear checking to see if they got it right.

Relatedly, I would also just say that the questions that animate me are not the same ones that animated previous generations of historians. We are all creatures of our own contexts. I’m not a player in the post-Cold War culture wars of the 1990s, just by virtue of having become a historian well after that. I’m not interested in re-litigating who started the Cold War. I’m not that interested in the question of whether the atomic bombs were “necessary” to end World War II, so much as I am interested in how the framing of the question is itself a historical production. I’m not one of these people who, rightly or wrongly, thinks that the atomic bombing of Japan is a moral referendum for the honor of the United States. Again, this is not meant to dismiss these questions at all. But they just aren’t what motivate me, personally, and if you go into this topic with different questions, you get very different answers. “What exactly did Harry Truman know and not know about the atomic bombings?” is the kind of question that appeals to me, and as the book indicates, I think you get a very different answer to a lot of other questions once you ask it.

To be very explicit, I don’t think my work is the last word on any topic. If it is, it means that either the field has died or there just isn’t any interest in the topic. So, I view the re-visiting of these works not as a takedown, but as a celebration of healthy scholarship: we’ve hopefully been able to come to new perspectives, sources, and interpretations over the last 40 years. If we haven’t, that is sadder than anything else!

—

William Thomas
American Institute of Physics
wthomas@aip.org

---

You can sign up to receive the Weekly Edition and other AIP newsletters by email here.

---