Redactions

Did the Japanese offer to surrender before Hiroshima? (Part 1)

by Alex Wellerstein, published May 2nd, 2022

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 because they wanted to drop the bombs anyway (for various other asserted reasons). It’s one of those things that has a grain of truth to it, but without a heaping of context and interpretation is misleading by itself. 

Photograph of the Suzuki cabinet, June 1945

The Suzuki Cabinet, who held the fate of Japan in their hands in the summer of 1945. Photograph is from June 9, 1945. Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki is front and center. Of note, second to Suzuki’s left, looking downward and glum, is Navy Minister Mitsumasa Yonai, one of the only members of the “peace party” actually on the cabinet. Contrast his expression with that of War Minister Korechika Anami (back row, two behind Yonai), who was, until very close to the end, one of the most die-hard supporters of a continued war. Photograph from Wikimedia Commons, somewhat touched up. A captioned overlay is here.

That there were “peace feelers” put out by some highly-placed Japanese in mid-1945 is well-known and well-documented. Specifically, there were several attempts to see whether the (then still-neutral) Soviet Union would be willing to serve as a mediator for a negotiated peace between the US and Japan. This story is the heart of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s justly influential Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (2005), and he goes over, in great detail, how these approaches worked (one in Japan, with the Soviet ambassador there, another in Moscow, with the Japanese ambassador there). Hasegawa’s argument isn’t about Japan being ready to surrender, though; he uses this account to show how dependent Japan’s ideas about the war’s possible ends were on a neutral Soviet Union.1

The distance between these “peace feelers” and an “offer” or even “readiness” to surrender is quite large. Japan was being governed at this point by a Supreme War Council, which was dominated by militarists who had no interest in peace. The “peace party” behind these feelers was a small minority of officials who were keeping their efforts secret from the rest of the Council, because they clearly feared they would be squashed otherwise. The “peace party” did appear to have the interest — and sometimes even the favor — of the Emperor, which is important and interesting, though the Emperor, as Hasegawa outlines in detail, was not as powerful as is sometimes assumed. The overall feeling that one takes away from Hasegawa’s book is that all of these “feelers” were very much “off the books,” as in they were exploratory gestures made by a group that was waiting for an opportunity that might tilt the balance of power their way, and certainly not some kind of formal, official, or binding plan made by the Japanese government.

Furthermore, the surrender that the “peace party” was contemplating was still miles away from the “unconditional surrender” demanded by the United States. There were conditions involved: mainly the preservation of the status and safety of the Emperor and the Imperial House, which they regarded as identical to the preservation of the Japanese nation. But as Hasegawa points out, they were so unclear on what they were looking for, that there was contemplation of other things they might ask for as well, liking getting to keep some of their conquered territories. Again, this was not a real plan so much as the feelers necessary for forming a possible future plan, and so we should not be surprised that it was pretty vague.

General MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito at Allied General Headquarters — a picture deliberately mean to contrast the 5’5″ Emperor with the six-foot American general. Photograph by Gaetano Faillace, via Wikimedia Commons.

One can argue, and people who argue against the necessity of the bombings do, that since the United States ultimately agreed to preserve the Emperor and Imperial House, that the US could have accepted such a condition earlier on if it had wanted to shorten the war. But this is not very compelling: it is a different thing to decide, after a war, that you are willing to cut your former enemy a break, versus cutting them that break while they are still your sworn enemy. The counter-argument, which even as someone who is not a die-hard “unconditional surrender was necessary” person I find somewhat compelling, is that if the US had modified its already-stated demands at that point, that it might have ultimately led to the Japanese making more demands, as part of the classic “give them an inch and they’ll ask for a foot” scenario. In any event, I doubt the Japanese would have been willing to accept the specific condition that the US ultimately ended up imposing during the occupation: that the Emperor had to publicly renounce his divinity. That’s a big “ask” to contemplate prior to surrender.

Anyway, whatever one thinks about the requirement of unconditional surrender and whether it prolonged the war — and it has been argued over since the 1940s — we can all agree, I think, that what the Japanese were unofficially “offering” was not what the US was demanding. And it is important to note that this was never actually offered to the US anyway: the Japanese were probing Soviet willingness to support them as a neutral party for a negotiated peace. So it was all a prelude to a negotiation of an offer. As it was, the Soviets weren’t interested (they were eager to declare war against Japan and seize promised territory as a consequence), and just strung them along. So the entire thing never got off the ground.

Cover sheet for a “MAGIC” intercept summary of cracked Japanese communications, classified ULTRA TOP SECRET, which was looked at during the Potsdam Conference in July 1945. From the National Security Archive.

The US was aware of these efforts by the Japanese, because it had cracked the Japanese diplomatic codes (the MAGIC intercepts), but it was never a formal “offer” for them to accept or reject. The general interpretation of the intercepts at the time was that Japan might be on the road to surrender, and they perceived there was a sympathetic “peace party” in their high command, but that Japan was ultimately not yet ready to accept unconditional surrender. Which I don’t think is really wrong, though of course one could debate about what one could do with that information.

At this point, I feel I should emphasize, that I don’t think the use of the atomic bombs the way they were used (two bombs on two cities in three days) was the only possible way to achieve the aims of the United States in World War II, or even that the goal of “unconditional surrender” was unambiguously the best thing to pursue. (See my article on the possible alternatives, for example, as to other possibilities that were on the table at the time.) I am saying, rather, that I think the argument offered up by those who would use the MAGIC intercept situation as an argument that the Japanese were “ready to surrender” prior to Hiroshima is not very compelling. It wasn’t an offer, it wasn’t unconditional surrender, and it wasn’t something the majority ruling the Japanese government had even approved or would support. It’s an important historical event that is crucial to understanding the end of the war (as Hasegawa makes quite clear), and one that complicates the “they all fanatics willing to fight to the death” argument that is used to justify using the atomic bombs, but it wasn’t anything like a surrender offer. I don’t have any problem with people making sound arguments either for or against the use of the atomic bombs — there are strong arguments on both sides — but they shouldn’t be based on myths. Unfortunately, many arguments in the popular sphere are.2

OK, but what if the above wasn’t the whole story? What if the Japanese did offer up a full, binding terms of surrender to the US directly, and those terms were exactly what the US ended up settling on with Japan after the war? I’m not sure that would change all of my analysis above (you would still have the issue of whether the US ought to have accepted the postwar terms before it was the postwar), but it would certainly complicate the situation! There has been an account of Japan doing just that, which has circulated for over 70 years. In part 2 of this series, I’ll be exploring that — the case of the enigmatic “Trohan memoranda.” The ultimate conclusion  spoilers! — is that it is likely bunk, but there’s a story in the telling…

Click here for part two of this series.

  1. At some point in the future, I would still like to write a longer post about Hasegawa’s book and arguments in general, because it is one of most frequent questions I get online. One of these days I will get around to it — the summary version is that I find much of his argumentation persuasive, though I think the ultimate question of “how much weight should we give the atomic bombs, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, internal Japanese pressures, or other factors in accounting for their unconditional surrender agreement?” is ultimately unanswerable in any satisfying way. [↩]
  2. The most pernicious myth in the “for” category remains, in my mind, the idea that the Japanese people were warned about the atomic bombings before their use — which to my mind is clearly not true, but gets a lot of traction on Internet forums and the like. [↩]

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News and Notes

NUKEMAP and the Ukraine–Russia war (so far)

by Alex Wellerstein, published April 9th, 2022

In early February 2022, 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 usage patterns tend to be lower when people are less worried about nuclear detonations, and while I do think people should be in general more worried about nuclear detonations during non-crisis periods than they are (because the possibility is still there), I don’t desire crisis periods. I’ll admit I did think, ah, maybe as a tool, NUKEMAP’s glory days have come and gone? 

Front page and article selection from the National Enquirer, March 21, 2022 edition

NUKEMAP’s most dubious media usage so far? From the March 22, 2022 edition of the National Enquirer. Yeah, they got my affiliation wrong — it’s the National Enquirer, they aren’t doing a lot of fact-checking! Thanks to Bill Geerhart for drawing this to my attention; I did manage to get my own copy as well, though these are his photos. (And before you make a Bat Boy joke, that’s Weekly World News. Totally different!)

But then Russia invaded Ukraine, and any part of me that got some kind of validation from NUKEMAP usage was quickly transmuted into a very different state of things: people are using the NUKEMAP too much. So much that my server became overwhelmed to the point that I was getting lots of feedback about it, and there were even articles written about it, and it was just taking a huge amount of my time trying to figure out the best ways to allow it to handle the amounts of traffic it was getting.

It’s impossible for me to know, for those first couple of weeks, exactly what the “demand” for NUKEMAP was, since the stats I have can only indicate how many people were served the page successfully and not the number who got a timeout screen. My rough guess, based on what happened once I improved the server capacity, was that about 50% of the people who wanted to use the NUKEMAP were unable to in this time, especially those who were not located in the United States where the server is located (one might think such things don’t matter in our cloud-based world, but they do for things like connection latency, which factors into how long your browser will wait before telling you it failed to connect). 

I scrambled quite a bit to figure out the best way to overhaul the server while it was simultaneously under strain, and talked with many very helpful volunteers who were experts at various aspects of it, but in the end I suspect that 90% of the problem was solved by just changing a single server setting. (I did some other changes that will speed it up in general, which is why there is now a little “loading” icon when you first connect — it used to do some things before acknowledging that it was connecting, and that was causing it to take a few extra seconds at times, which could hit that timeout.)1

The daily traffic of the NUKEMAP website from January 1, 2022 through the first week of April, 2022

The NUKEMAP daily traffic, from Google Analytics. I have annotated the various periods of usage with average (thousands per day) users. These are all visitors, not necessarily unique visitors (the numbers are not that different). The period in which it was “broken” is when it was unable to meet the demand, and so the actual demand was likely much higher than what was served. Of the 7 million in this time period, almost 6 million are from February 24th onward.

You can see, from the graph above, the remarkable increase that happened once I made these changes — the number of users pretty much doubled. What is really unusual about the above is not just that the number of users is very high, but that it doesn’t look like the standard spike-and-long-tail that is usually the hallmark of a moment of virality, but it is more like a plateau (inadequate server resources) that turns into a mountain. The traffic has gone down quite a bit over the last few weeks, but the “baseline” today is still twice what it was in January and early February.

In terms of actual usage, I haven’t tried to analyze the details — it takes a lot of work to do that, and as I’ve noted, I don’t have a lot of time at the moment — but unsurprisingly it looks like a lot of the users have been in Europe, more so than usual. Per usual, the majority of users are in Anglophone countries (because NUKEMAP is in English, something I still intend to remedy in the future), and especially the USA, but there are interested trends in some of the geographical data:  the countries that host NATO nuclear weapons (Belgium, Germany, Italy the Netherlands) definitely seem to have an inflated usage patterns, as does Poland, Ukraine, and Russia. Not surprising, but interesting to see.

Map of NUKEMAP usage patterns for Europe from February through April 2022

NUKEMAP usage for European nations for February 24, 2022 through early April 2022, with select individual counts shown (in thousands). Data and map from Google Analytics.

I am glad that this got fixed, but this took quite a lot of time to figure out (I am not a server admin!), and it added quite a lot to my already-substantial workload by itself. The increased attention, and nuclear anxiety, also lead to increased numbers of media requests, which I try to honor (but don’t always have time to — believe it or not, NUKEMAP is only one small portion of my workload and responsibilities). So, for example, I have several blog posts that I meant to post in that period that haven’t come to fruition yet, both because it felt somehow inappropriate in the early period of the war to post something about nuclear weapons that had nothing to do with the present work (I have one about an interesting World War II topic that I have pretty much written, but have been holding back until it felt right), and also because the time it takes to write a blog post, even a rather breezy one, is always in competition with the other things I am supposed to be doing (teaching, grading, reviewing, writing, directing, advising, living).

So this post is just a very quick update on things, since the last thing I posted was about the temporary mirror (which is still up, for now, but will soon just be redirected to the main server). There are a few things that were on the nuclearsecrecy.com domain that are no longer functional because of how I had to reconfigure the server, notably NUKEMAP Classic, which was the original 2012 version of NUKEMAP that had much more reduced functionality but would let you put in arbitrarily (and ridiculously) high yields. There are changes to that code that would need to be made to make it run on the new setup, and I’ll admit that I haven’t really felt that it was such a pressing need, since I have essentially no confidence in those arbitrarily-large yield calculations (once you scale up to, say, the tens of billions of tons of TNT, you are talking about fireballs that are themselves larger than the atmosphere, and so there are a lot of things that are just not going to similarly scale up the same way — like the formation of the blast wave). There are times when people would still like to put in ridiculous yields just to get a very hand-wavy look at them, and maybe they could be accommodated in the existing NUKEMAP code (I would make it put a “warning: the model doesn’t work above 100 Mt, and may not even be accurate at 100 Mt” pop-up if you did so), which would be easier than fixing NUKEMAP Classic (which now also just looks very ugly to my eyes). If you have strong thoughts on the matter, feel free to let me know. 

I did, however, make some time to clean up my office for the first time since the pandemic began, and to put up some new decorations — Soviet Civil Defense posters, printed in Kyiv in 1986 — on the wall. A television crew came to talk to me about NUKEMAP, but they ended up not filming in here. But I was happy to have a more functional office anyway, and plainly not above showing it off.

Anyway, as always, more soon. I have tried to hold back in offering too many concrete thoughts on the Ukraine–Russia situation, except to point out (in a Twitter thread that got retweeted enough times to make me feel uncomfortable and want to keep my mouth shut) that I do not think the probability of nuclear use is that high at the moment — higher than normal, but lower than during the 2017-18 North Korean crisis — but otherwise I have tried not to predict the future (I do not think historians are particularly gifted at such endeavors; as one senior scholar put it to me when I was just an undergraduate, we struggle as it is to understand the past). But I do have some thoughts on “what it all means” beyond just being horrified and appalled (by both the Russian behavior and the behavior of those various groups among us who would justify and enable them) that I am trying to write up as an essay that hopefully will come into existence fairly soon.

  1. I did two things that seem to have dramatically improved the performance: I made it so that everything client-side was served from Amazon S3 buckets, which are much faster and easier to handle than using a real server. Everything that is server-side — which are several different parts of how NUKEMAP works, including an initial database query to try and figure out what the biggest city near the user is, based on their IP — is on a separate AWS server running Apache, and I made all of that fully asynchronous, which it was not before, because I am someone who learned most of his programming patterns in the late 1990s/early 2000s. This helped a bit by itself, but the Apache server was still the bottleneck until I increased the number of “workers” that Apache was allocating for connections. By default, the Apache settings are pretty low — they don’t want to let Apache dominate a server’s CPU and RAM — and raising those by a factor of 100 or so really opened up the flood-gates and allowed it to do a lot more than it had been doing before. Once I did that, the results were almost immediately better, as the server was sufficiently strong to handle a lot more traffic than it had been set up to handle. [↩]

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Meditations

10 years of NUKEMAP

by Alex Wellerstein, published February 3rd, 2022

I was somewhat surprised to realize that today is the 10th 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.

NUKEMAP as it looks at the moment. You can see some previous iterations in this post.

The most disturbing effect of the passing of time with NUKEMAP has been the slightly different ways in which people talk to me about having used it. After a couple of years, I started to get people coming up to me and saying, “I used NUKEMAP when I was an undergraduate,” which wasn’t so bad, since said people were generally in graduate school. But now I get people who tell me they used NUKEMAP in elementary school, and the people telling me this are not in middle school, but look like adults. Which on the one hand makes me feel great — like I’m having an impact in this world — but on the other hand makes me feel old, because of course to me it still feels like I just created this site “the other day.”

I’m not going to write a long post reflecting on how I feel about the site, because I did that five years ago and my thoughts haven’t really changed. I still have things I’d like to add to it, and I’m still working on it pretty regularly, but as I wrote recently in reflecting on 10 years of blogging, I never have quite enough time to get all the things done I’d like. But some things that have been in the works for the last couple of years, which should come to fruition sometime in the next year include:

  1. 1a localization project so that NUKEMAP can be translated into languages other than English (in principle easy to do, in practice just very time consuming)
  2. much better mobile support for NUKEMAP (this is almost done)
  3. a means for calculating the possible areas of fire burn based on terrain type (this has been in the works for years but last summer a student working with me made huge progress on it)
  4. one of several means of visualizing 3D mushroom clouds again (variants of the NUKEMAP3D concept; a team of students is currently working on one of these, and I have another quick-and-dirty approach I am thinking of trying to implement)
  5. a dynamic fallout model so you can see the fallout plume grow and decay over time (a team of students working for me last summer made great progress on this front, but I’d need to really sit down with it for awhile to get it ready to deploy)

There are also some little tweaks to the underlying effects model I’ve been meaning to make (the prompt radiation curve gets out of whack at some yields, it’d be nice to have something related to underground or underwater detonations; the mushroom cloud to KMZ export has some little annoying bugs in it). 

The main thing not in the works that I get asked about all the time is support for EMP effects, and that is because a) there are no open-source models of EMP effects that I have been able to find that allow you to draw useful visualizations of them (if anyone knows of one, let me know, but I’ve looked for years), and b) even if I could draw a nice HEMP SMILE diagram for a nuke at arbitrary yield and arbitrary height of burst, it’s nontrivial to translate those visualizations into meaning for people, and this is an area that is so fraught with political implications and technical disagreements/uncertainty that I am a little hesitant to go into it (I am not an EMP alarmist, but I also don’t think it would be nothing, and finding a model that would let me convey the lived reality of it is difficult). This could change in the future, depending on what is out there and how I feel about it, but I don’t have any ongoing plans to dip my toe into this debate right now (I revisit this question about once a year, for what it is worth).  

Pageviews for NUKEMAP as of today. 48.8 million total pageviews (38 million unique).

One thing that I’ve been meaning to do for years (“when I get some time,” ha), is to do a more comprehensive analysis of NUKEMAP usage behaviors and make that data easily accessible. This anniversary snuck up on me, so I haven’t been able to roll that out today. But here’s a little sample of some of that data.

NUKEMAP collects two kinds of different statistics of users. First, just the basic demographic information and page usage information that Google Analytics provides (which is useful but very “high level”). Second, unless you disable it, every detonation a user make is logged into a gigantic database, including some information about the user (e.g., if it can, it will try to figure out from a user’s IP address what country they are in). All geographical data is fuzzed by enough that I can’t tell exactly where nukes are aimed (I trim enough off of the latitudes and longitudes that I can see basic areas but not specific buildings), and I don’t keep any user-identifiable information (IP addresses are not logged). The resulting data is pretty interesting, but at this point there’s a LOT of it — there have been about 220 million detonations. That’s a large-enough dataset that even manipulating the data can take awhile, but I’m in the process of having a machine crunch it down into usable pieces so I can actually do some analysis of it.

Who uses NUKEMAP? More like, who doesn’t? This is from Google Analytics.

But here are a few little samples. Who uses NUKEMAP? Pretty much every nation with an outgoing internet connection has had at least one visitor to NUKEMAP, which is a little amazing and overwhelming, even more so since NUKEMAP is in English (obviously there are ways to translate websites on the fly, but it’s an obvious impediment). The top users are Americans, no surprise there, but the list from then on is interesting. Here are the top 10 countries by NUKEMAP users:

  1. United States of America, 14.2 million users (34% of total)
  2. United Kingdom, 2.4 million (7.5%)
  3. Canada, 1.4 million (4.4%)
  4. Germany, 1.1 million (3.5%)
  5. Russia, 1.1 million (3.3%)
  6. Australia, 977K (3%)
  7. France, 856K (2.6%)
  8. Poland, 633K (1.9%)
  9. Spain, 582K (1.8%)
  10. Brazil, 572K (1.8%)

At one point, Google Analytics said it had been visited at least once from North Korea, but now it seems to be not so sure. I’ve no idea how accurate something like that could be, of course. It’s a little amusing to imagine Kim Jong-Un using it; hopefully he’d look at it and say, “gosh, let’s avoid having this happen.”

The oddest “use stories” I get are from people who do work in various aspects of the US government, military, or nuclear complex who tell me that they like to use it to “play around” with things that don’t feel “right” to do on official government software. I take that as high praise, even if it does present certain uncomfortable aspects!

What are the most popular yields of weapons that people test? It probably comes as no surprise who the King of the Bombs is — the Tsar Bomba’s maximum design yield (100 Mt) is by far the most popular yield, with over 81 million simulations by itself (37% of the total detonations). After that, it gets much more equitable, at least among the preset options, which (with two exceptions) are the most popular individual yield choices: the 50 Mt Tsar Bomba gets 5% (11.9 million), 20 kt (Fat Man and Nagasaki) also is 5% (9.9 million), 15 kt (Hiroshima) gets 4% (9.3 million), and the Davy Crockett (20 tons) gets 4% (9 million). None of that is super surprising based on why and how people use NUKEMAP: the two  World War II yields (NUKEMAP always gets a lot of traffic around the anniversaries), the Tsar Bomba (biggest bomb), and the Davy Crockett (smallest bomb) look a whole lot like what I see when I ask people what they do with NUKEMAP (trying the biggest, the largest, the known). After these ones you get a dwindling percentage for each yield in the preset list, down to the least popular, 300 tons (B61 mod 3), which gets a little over a million uses. The only two yield settings that get higher than a million and are not in the preset list are 1 kt and 10 kt — which is not super surprising, either.

All together, the preset options make up 92% of what people try when they use NUKEMAP. That 8% of “non-preset” NUKEMAP can be pretty wild, though; people try lots of weird numbers, the purpose of which I cannot really guess. Most of them are either nice round numbers (e.g., 3800, or 40), which sort of makes sense, and some of them are just-off from round numbers (99,999), which might be experimentation (what’s a kiloton, between friends?). With such a large number of users, even a tiny bit of spontaneous experimentation means a lot of uses — 27,362 people each tried 99 kilotons. Over 19,000 people opted for more obvious symbolism of 666 kt. 

The most interesting to me are trends about who nukes who. These are harder to get at, because while it is easy to figure out the target of a NUKEMAP nuke (it’s whatever latitude and longitude the user chooses), it’s trickier to accurately get information about where the user is located, especially since I am trying to avoid anything that would compromise their privacy (people are already “spooked” by nuclear topics, and a frequent comment about NUKEMAP online is that if you use it, you’ll be “on a list” — if so, then we’re all on the list).

There was a period in which this kind of anonymized user location data was provided easily by Google, and then that got very unreliable for awhile, and only in the last few years was I able to once again start getting that data again (using an IP address lookup table function I wrote), but even that is not entirely accurate (because people can use VPNs, and IP lookup tables can be inaccurate or go out of date). I wasn’t able to get the database to collate that data in time for this blog post (the dataset is big and not indexed, so it can take hours to run big queries — this is fixable, of course, but not in the span of an hour or two). So look for that in the near future. In the past, it has had some interesting patterns regarding how people in some countries use NUKEMAP to model attacks on other countries.

NUKEMAP still pulls in a respectable number of hits per day on a slow day — on the order of 10,000 or so. On a “viral” day that can kick up an order of magnitude, and those still happen (as I write this, there are a bunch of “what would happen if we got nuked?” articles going around for cities in Scotland), though it has been awhile since it had a “super viral” day of over 100,000 visitors. More views equal more education, but the cost of operation also scales pretty linearly as well. So I’m extremely grateful to the organizations that make the financial aspects of NUKEMAP possible: Mapbox for giving me a decent educational/humanitarian discount for the tile services; Global Zero for stepping in and picking up the server bills when my previous source dried up due to COVID belt-tightening, and the admins (esp. my dean, Kelland Thomas) at the Stevens Institute of Technology who consider this work a core part of my research and scholarship (which an outsider might take for granted, but any university professor knows is something to be appreciated!). 

As always, more soon…!

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Visions

Surely You’re Joking, Comrade Beria!

by Alex Wellerstein, published November 19th, 2021

In my recent article on the occasion of the 60th 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, radically transforming what is easily available to scholars outside of Russia. The extraordinarily useful series of (curated, redacted) archival documents, Atomniy Projekt SSSR (Atomic Project of the Soviet Union), for example, went nearly overnight from being something only existed in full in a handful of libraries in the United States (I was proud to make sure that the Niels Bohr Library at the American Institute of Physics has a complete set), to being easily accessible through the Rosatom Digital Library.

But I’m not here to talk about the stuff that’s useful to scholars. I’m here to talk about their section on “Atomic Fun” from the Soviet atomic bomb project. This is a collection of, as they put it, “funny stories.”

A very silly adaptation of the classic cover of Richard Feynman's "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", except it's about Comrade Beria, a terrible guy.

I couldn’t help myself. Yes, this is a parody — yes, it is a joke that cuts both ways.

It’s an odd concept. It’s hard to imagine the Department of Energy creating an “Atomic Fun” exhibit. It’s not that there wouldn’t be things to say — the history of the US nuclear program involves some amusing stories. Think about Feynman’s Los Alamos antics, sneaking through fences and (ho ho!) cracking safes with classified documents in them. Think about Niels Bohr sending a letter to British scientists after the Nazis occupied Denmark, telling them he was okay, and asking them to forward the message to MAUD RAY KENT. The British thought it was an anagram for RAYDUM TAKEN — radium taken! The Nazis are definitely building a bomb! They named their own secret bomb effort the MAUD Committee after this sage warning! But (ho ho!) it turned out that Bohr was just trying to send a hopeful message to the former governess of his children, Maud Ray, who lived in the county of Kent. Whoops!

The problem is, of course, that such levity gets undercut by a) the horrific accounts of what happened to the Japanese victims of the atomic bombs, b) other disturbing legacies of people who are rightly classified as victims of the US nuclear complex (downwinders, exposed plant employees, the Marshallese, etc.), and c) a reminder that we are having some laughs in the service of the building of weapons of mass destruction and there’s something inherently problematic about that. 

We can make some jokes about the Manhattan Project and nuclear testing, but they have to be a little askew from actual history and reality. Source: XKCD, obviously.

But maybe Russia is different. Maybe they’ve just got a deeper sense of pathos, and a sense of shared victimhood. The Soviet atomic bombs were built under Stalin. Lavrenty Beria, one of the most fearsome figures in Soviet history, ran the program. Forced GULAG labor was used for the project, under horrendous conditions. The whole thing is just so dark that maybe, perhaps, you can get away with a little humor — maybe it’s a necessary thing. Maybe it’s a Freudian release of tension: you have to sometimes laugh, as a country and a culture, so you don’t just cry.

Or maybe it’s part of the “Stalin wasn’t so bad” nationalist revisionism that has been building in Putin’s 21st-century Russian Federation. I don’t know.

Either way, I find it fascinating. 

Let’s start with my favorite story from the website, “And they didn’t get shot,” which happens to be the very first one I read when I first found the site some time back. Note that this is my own interpretive translation from the Russian.1

They didn’t get shot

The head of the nuclear project, Lavrenty Beria, arrived in the Urals, at a new facility under construction. It was a cold autumn; there was nothing at the new site but mud, and driving there required going off-road. There was no housing, other than barracks. Prisoners were still hard at work laying the foundations.

The engineers waited, fearful of the famously harsh NKVD chief. Beria, in his trademark black leather coat, emerged from the car and grabbed his lower back in pain, having been bounced around by the rough ground. The engineers went cold as the thought raced through their minds: “He’ll send us to the Gulag!

The distinguished guest was assigned to the best barrack for his overnight stay. As soon as Beria lay down, the bed he was on collapsed underneath him! The engineers were petrified: “Someone’s getting shot!” 

In the morning, it was discovered that a prisoner had stolen Beria’s black leather coat. The engineers were horrified: “He’ll shoot everyone!”

But in the end, Beria did not shoot anyone. After returning to Moscow, he issued orders to provide the workers of the facility with better food and sent them new furniture. The end.

Humor is sometimes described as subverted expectations, so I guess it works out: we all thought were going to be imprisoned or executed by one of the most terrifying men in the Soviet Union — who imprisoned millions and had thousands shot in the head (and we won’t even bring up the rapes) — but instead, we weren’t! Hilarious!

Most of the stories are not quite this on-the-nose about the circumstances of the Soviet nuclear complex; they fall into the genre of “scientists are clever, except when they’re not, and both of those can be humorous,” which really is the Feynman-style approach, even if the Russian sense of humor is a little different. But there are also lots of ones that, in their own way, take the terror-absurdist situation of working for Stalin and try to turn it into something amusing. An example:

Dead flies

Every evening, the young nuclear engineers at Arzamas-16 (KB-11) who worked with radioactive substances had to hand over their laboratory to the commandant of the military guard. But one night, the commandant was unusually late, leaving them waiting for hours. To amuse themselves, the engineers caught and killed flies, and piled up them by the window. 

– “What’s this?” the commandant asked sternly, after he finally arrived.

– “Flies,” the engineers replied.

– “They’re dead..!?” the commandant asked.

— “Yes, they died… from radiation…” the engineers ad-libbed.

The commandant immediately vanished. He would never come to the laboratory personally again, instead sending assistants. 

The premise of the humor is the same as those in Feynman’s tales about Los Alamos, which I find interesting: dumb military flacks versus clever and bored scientists. But it’s got a much more sinister undertone when you transpose it to the land of Mayak and Chernobyl. 

Here’s another one, which is a twist on classic “misunderstanding” jokes:

Deadlines for everyone

A group of engineers arrived at the construction of a secret facility. At the gate they were greeted by a stern major who had a placard behind him which read: 

        Keep in mind these important lines
         Working hard shortens your time 

“What happened?” the worried engineers asked. “Did the government cut the deadlines for the project?” 

“The poster is not for you,” the major consoled them, “but for the prisoners working here.”2

Ah, the engineers misunderstood a message that was meant for the prison labor force, not them! A classic Soviet-era mistake!

I am torn between finding these sorts of things to be exceedingly bizarre and frankly offensive, versus being impressed that the Russian nuclear agency is willing to be so… transparent (?) about the insane situation of the Soviet nuclear program. 

Some of the stories are more in the line of “hooray for Soviet scientists” genre, which I find a lot less interesting. There’s one about Yuri Trutnev visiting Los Alamos in the 1990s and having a picnic with American scientists. Suddenly, a snake emerges from under a stone, and everyone backs away except for Trutnev, who steps forward and spits on its head, and is then celebrated as the “hero of the day.” Ho, hum.

And there are a couple “scientist says something somewhat amusing” stories, such as one who, after a briefing on some kind of “smart,” self-aiming delivery system, remarks, “If the bomb becomes too smart, maybe it won’t want to fall out of the plane!” OK. I guess.

But let’s leave with one that manages to be one of these “revealing” jokes, but isn’t quite as dismal as the others:

Information collection

Uranium mining in the USSR was highly classified. Even high-ranking officials from the Soviet nuclear ministry did not know the details of it. Once, one of these leaders received an American delegation. 

– “Where do you mine your uranium?” one of the guests asked.

– “Everywhere! We have a large country!” the Soviet leader replied. 

The Americans approached a large map of the USSR: “According to our satellite intelligence, you do it here, here, and here.”

– “Well, your intelligence is confused,” the leader explained, and eventually saw the delegation off. But after they had left, he rubbed his hands together gleefully: “Finally, I, too, know where the uranium is mined!”

Who says you can’t have a little clean, atomic humor at the expense of Soviet secrecy?

  1. Translating non-technical Russian is already a tricky thing — my favorite thing about most Soviet nuclear records is that they are very literal and so pretty easy for someone whose Russian translation abilities are rather limited to make sense of — but translating humor is very difficult, since it is also about timing, rhythm, word-play, and cultural expectations. So I’ve done my best here to preserve what I perceive as the spirit of these stories, without worrying too much about how literal the translation is. [↩]
  2. I had to fudge the limerick translation a little bit to make it rhyme, but I think it captures the sentiment of the thing, as well as it being a couplet. [↩]

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How many people have Q Clearance?

by Alex Wellerstein, published November 12th, 2021

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 (originally by the FBI), with the same requirements as a Top Secret clearance, and keeping it requires being re-investigated every 5 years. 

A Restricted Data stamp from a document from the 1940s. If you don’t have a Q Clearance, you’re not supposed to see things like this. Don’t worry, this one was declassified. Strictly speaking, they are supposed to cross the stamps out once they declassify them. But they didn’t always do that consistently. I photographed this one at the NARA Archives II facility. You can see more photos I’ve taken of secrecy stamps, if that sort of thing piques your interest.

So how many people currently have Q clearances? Someone asked me this a year ago and I realized that not only did I not know, but I didn’t really have a great way to even estimate it. So I did the natural thing and filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Energy and asked them. 

And today, they got back to me with this simple table:

April 2018 – 87,113

April 2019 – 90,454

April 2020 – 98,103

April 2021 – 92,177

Which is somewhat interesting. First, I guess that’s more than I would have guessed, but again, I didn’t have a great place to start for guessing. I knew, from Dana Priest and William Arkin’s Top Secret America that a decade ago, 850,000 Americans had a Top Secret clearance — a remarkable number. As of 2019, that’s up to 1.25 million.1 That Q clearances would be about 10% of that seems reasonable once I consider it, but if you had told me it was 5%, or 15%, I also might have thought that was reasonable, too, in the absence of information.

Second, there’s an interesting amount of fluctuation there. From 2018 to 2019, it grew by 3,341 people, but then the next year it grew by 7,649 people, but then it dropped by almost 6,000 people. That strikes me as a pretty impressive amount of variance. A nearly 10% gain, followed by a 6% loss. But again, I don’t have any more data than this tiny snapshot, so it is hard to say more about it.

Anyway, I thought people would be interested (and wanted to have an “answer” out there in case anyone else Googled this question in the future). 

Obligatory “quick Excel graph that is not really necessary since we are talking about a whopping four data points.”

The most amusing thing about the Q Clearance, as an aside, is that while its name sounds so enigmatic and mysterious, its actual origins are aggressively mundane. During the latter part of the Manhattan Project, they created a new form called the Personnel Security Questionnaire that would be the basis of their background checks. When the Atomic Energy Commission took over administration of the US nuclear complex, they inherited the same form. In figuring out early clearance levels, they decided that maybe they ought to just call them P, S, and Q, after the PSQ form.

“P” would be for people who didn’t need access to Restricted Data and had no access to it at all; “S” was for frequent visitors to AEC installations who didn’t need access to Restricted Data but still needed to be in places where it might be found; “Q” was for people who needed access to Restricted Data. So instead of being some shadowy name, its name is literally taken from a form. Like many secret matters, the reality is far less interesting once you get the full story.2

  1. Thanks to Steve Aftergood at FAS for sending me this document! [↩]
  2. The P designation is still used today (but not called P Clearance, because it is not a clearance, strictly speaking, but an “approval”). I suspect they retired S at some point because it is easy to confuse with someone who is cleared for Secret information. [↩]

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