1963, Red Explosion by Andy Warhol ©Andy Warhol Foundation / ©Corbis
For over 70 years, scientists, by dint of their unique ability to inform policymakers, have occupied a special position in driving the ways governments treat nuclear secrets. Enrico Fermi went so far as to write, "secrecy was not started by generals, was not started by security officers, but was started by physicists." He was undoubtedly thinking of Leo Szilard, who, having conceived of the chain reaction in late 1933 and later reported it in a 1934 patent application, promptly assigned it to the British government to be kept secret. In many ways, Fermi did not exaggerate: Szilard's first attempt to assign the patent was rejected by the War Department, which saw no harm in disclosing his insight.
In the early days, when no one was sure how widely known the basic principles of the bomb were, blanket secrecy was a sensible approach. Indeed there are still prohibitive risks involved in releasing many nuclear secrets. Today, though, the balance is different. Scientists and military experts, through more than half a century of experience, are now far more capable of distinguishing between dangerous and benign releases of information. At the same time, an increase in global exchange and international cooperation has raised the value of shared information, not only within the nuclear sphere, but with respect to national security measures more generally. Moreover, Cold War experience has taught us that sharing some information with enemies can help shape their behavior in useful ways. Physicists, and those they advise, are losing opportunities to promote and use openness strategically in ways that would yield big dividends for security. It's high time more of them realized that reflexively hoarding nuclear secrets, even from enemies, has become downright dangerous.
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Too many scientists today wrongly assume that a lack of information is the biggest barrier facing terrorists or countries that might build nuclear bombs, and they overstate the risks involved in sharing information as a result. Indeed the greatest challenges are likely to come from the less glamorous work done, not by scientists and engineers, but by technicians and machinists. For example, it is much easier to describe the most effective shapes of uranium for use in a nuclear weapon than it is to machine uranium to those specifications. Similarly, it is relatively easy to calculate the shapes of explosives that might be used in a plutonium bomb, but shaping those explosives without degrading them is much more difficult. Considerations such as these suggest a useful starting point in separating information that can be safely shared from skills that should not be. While some theoretical ideas can make the dirty work easier—a judgment that cautions against haphazardly releasing information—many would not contribute materially to anyone's effort to build a bomb.
All this might be mere academic debate if it did not perversely shape strategy. In the United States examples of missed opportunities for responsible and advantageous transparency abound. The most frustrating, perhaps, are those wherein valuable sharing of information within the US government itself is stymied. Take one example: If a nuclear weapon slips unnoticed into the United States, police officers, border security, and others on the front lines have the potential to be the most effective nuclear "detectors." For that to be realized, however, they must be properly trained to spot telltale signs of nuclear plots—something that US secrecy policy makes difficult, if not impossible. Such hoarding of nuclear information by the federal government makes cooperation between the United States and its allies similarly difficult. It prohibits sharing certain intelligence that might be used to thwart nuclear plots; it also thwarts attempts to share technology that could be used to detect nuclear arms.