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By Root 1271 0

era. Decrying the security regime their government tried to impose on them, some American scientists sought a return to the days when international conferences and uncensored physics journals allowed the fullest exchange of views among colleagues. The ‘fraternity’ of physicists, as Fortune magazine called it, was in its natural state disinclined to admit secrecy to its ranks. ‘Progress belongs to us all’, insisted Laura Fermi, ‘and secrecy cannot for long restrict it within limited boundaries’—loftily said, and close to the mark for many scientists. Physicists joined philosophers and political figures in pleas to create ‘One World’, a world government, and the gadfly Leo Szilard suggested the full-scale international exchange of scientists (and their families) to serve as monitors of nuclear control agreements and dispensers of information, or even the ‘mining’ of American and Russian cities with nuclear bombs, as deterrents to either nation contemplating a pre-emptive strike against the other. In some cases, scientists returned from exile—perhaps from productive nuclear work in the United States, Canada, or Britain—to their home countries and their prewar colleagues. The Dane Niels Bohr remained the conscience of the international community of physicists. In his diffident way, he emphasized the unity of humankind bound by the common threat of annihilation, and urged a return to scientific community and openness.2

Curiously, the counterthrusts of secrecy and openness found a common result. Those who sought security through secrecy argued that the national interest would be served best by building or buying nuclear apparatus and implying, as least, that a nuclear weapons program might be under way. An open proclamation of nuclear intentions might aggravate the great powers, invite imitation and espionage by jealous neighbors, provoke domestic opposition, or embarrass scientists and technicians should their efforts fail; secrecy seemed to many nuclear-weapons advocates a logical policy. Secrecy, or ‘ambiguity’, or ‘opacity’, about one’s nuclear plans might also serve strategic purposes, as Israel and South Africa concluded. Those who urged openness in nuclear matters generally did so because, they claimed, only international trust inspired by sharing information would prevent an arms race by nation states, who in the absence of donated wisdom about the bomb would be more likely to pursue, and jealously guard, an arms program. International control of the nuclear industry would allow nations to relax, secure in the knowledge that advances in nuclear physics would be accomplished and witnessed by everyone. If the sharing of nuclear knowledge meant that any interested and well-equipped state could build a bomb, so be it—though most of those who championed the return of ‘fraternity’ to world physics hoped instead that sharing would obviate the need felt by nations to make weapons of their own. This was, it turned out, too fond a hope.

The world’s first nuclear power harbored its own ambivalence about sharing nuclear information. President Harry Truman believed there was a single, magical nuclear secret; as long as the magician refused to show his audience how his best trick worked, no one would figure it out. He thus supported Bernard Baruch’s quest to avoid any equitable international control of atomic energy, endorsing instead a naive reliance on perpetuating the US nuclear monopoly, with secrecy to be assured with the passage of the McMahon Bill in July 1946. The shock of the Soviet atomic test in August 1949 brought only an escalation of the arms race and renewed determination to expose the spies who were said to have divulged to the Russians the magician’s secret. Yet the administration’s futile commitment to secrecy did not prevent Leslie Groves, one of secrecy’s staunchest exponents, from authorizing the 1945 publication of the Smyth Report (after its principal author, the physicist Henry Smyth), a surprisingly frank survey of the science and engineering of the atomic bomb, and an account that Russian and other scientists