“Secrecy and Espionage in Science”

By Dan Kennefick

At the April 2019 APS meeting the FHP and the Forum on Physics and Society co-sponsored a session of invited talks on Secrecy and Espionage in Science. There was considerable interest in the topic, with the room being packed. Quite a few people were standing at the back. The large and engaged audience was treated to three excellent talks. The first was given by Audra Wolfe, a historian of science who is a member of the FHP’s Executive Committee as well as being the author of Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science. Her talk, entitled “Scientific Internationalism, Scientific Intelligence, Or Both?” concerned the efforts made by the United States government to wrestle with competing impulses in post-war science policy. On the one hand they wished to maintain secrecy, especially in the area of nuclear physics, and on the other hand they hoped to use science as an aid to Diplomacy in the cold war. Quite early on they recognized that secrecy was not palatable to the scientists themselves and that it would be unhelpful in efforts to attract scientists to the US and to encourage positive interactions between them internationally. She showed how the postwar emergence of the Central Intelligence Agency naturally suggested the idea that interactions with and between scientists should fundamentally be an intelligence matter, but that this conception was, to a considerably extent, trumped by the desire to let the State department handle science as an arm of international Diplomacy. Most interesting of all she shows how the Diplomats and the Spooks could find common ground on the idea of the science attaché as a scientific intelligence gatherer at American embassies abroad. Internal government documents reveal that a vision of intelligence gatherers centralizing the latest scientific knowledge in government hands never became a reality, but considerable penetration of the scientific community by the intelligence apparatus was achieved. In her view “The United States’ commitment to international scientific cooperation was never primarily about scientific values; it was scientific internationalism for the sake of anti-Communism.”

Alex Wellerstein is a historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology and the creator of NUKEMAP (https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/) which permits the ordinary citizen to find out how their city would fare in a nuclear attack. His talk was entitled “The legacy of nuclear secrecy in the United States” and it discussed the scientific area in which the tensions addressed in Wolfe’s talk were at their sharpest, namely nuclear research. In this subject even most of the scientists agreed about the need for secrecy and he discussed the early self-censorship of the small group working on fission chain-reaction in the early days of World War II and the role of major figures like Oppenheimer in formulating secrecy policy after the war. One particularly interesting point that he made was the extent to which secrecy efforts during the period of the Manhattan project itself were probably mostly aimed at keeping Congress in the dark, since they could have shut the project down. Leaks as such were unlikely to reach the Germans in a form which would be helpful to them and the Russians were still allies at that point. As with all of the talks, Wellerstein was confronted with a long queue of listeners at the microphone eager to ask questions when he concluded.

The final speaker was Douglas O’Reagan, whose talk was titled “Stealing Nazi Science: Allied Efforts to Acquire German Science and Technology during and after the Second World War.” He is the author of the forthcoming book “Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science after the Second World War”. His talk was focused on the spoils of German science and technology, which were greatly coveted by the wartime Allies, who hoped to be recompensed for their enormous wartime losses by benefiting from technology and scientific transfer from Germany to their countries. He demonstrated strikingly that their understanding of the problems involved in such a transfer was often on a very high level. There was considerable appreciation of the difficulties in simply transfering science and technology. Allied powers often recognized that taking material and personnel out of their own environment would probably merely result in the loss of the very “know-how” they sought to acquire. The very phrase “know-how”, he confides, emerged in this period. Often they preferred to send their own people to work with German research groups within Germany, hoping to thereby transfer the knowledge thus absorbed back home. The French, he argues, saw the dangers in sending older scientists (too set in their ways) or younger people (too susceptible to putting down roots in Germany) and preferred to send mid-career scientists. Of course simply grabbing whatever wasn’t nailed down (and some of what was) and transporting it home still had its attractions, especially to the Soviets, who felt the most in need of an infusion of technical equipment. It was a fascinating talk with which to end an engaging session.

All three session contributors are social media stars and can be followed on twitter at @ColdWarScience (Audra Wolfe), @wellerstein and @D_OReagan.