Alex Wellerstein on Donald Trump and Nuclear Secrets

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Show notes:

Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (Alex Wellerstein, April 19, 2021)
“Can Trump Just Declare Nuclear Secrets Unclassified?” (Alex Wellerstein, Lawfare, August 18, 2022)
US Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History (Chuck Hansen, March 20, 1998)
“JFK Address at UN General Assembly” (John F. Kennedy, September 25, 1961)

Archival:

“Attorney General Merrick Garland Delivers Remarks Announcing Motion to Unseal Search Warrant” (The Justice Department, August 11, 2022)
“BREAKING: Donald Trump Files Lawsuit Against U.S. Government” (CBS Miami, August 22, 2022)
“MTP NOW Aug. 26 – Judge Unseals Trump Affidavit; Biden On Campaign Trail; Eased Price Pressures” (NBC News, August 26, 2022)
“Nuclear Documents Among Items FBI Sought In Mar-a-Lago Search: WaPo” (MSNBC, August 11, 2022)
“JFK'S ADDRESS BEFORE THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY (SEPTEMBER 25, 1961)” (David Von Pein's JFK Channel, July 24, 2015)

Transcript:

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: Secrecy is, to some degree, inherently anti-democratic. If you are trying to say the people who are working in a country need to have information about how the country is working in order to choose what direction the country is going in—if they are being denied fundamental information about how their country is working, there's no way they're going to be able to make their judgments accordingly.

MARK HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. My name is Mark Hannah. This week we, like many of you, are watching a bit of a spectacle unfold at former President Donald Trump's residence over at Mar-a-Lago, a story much of the United States has been hanging onto for weeks now.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: It's got us thinking about secrets, especially when it comes to national security.

WELLERSTEIN: I was going through the library stacks and doing that sort of serendipitous, pick a book and then see all the books around it and see all the books you never would have thought to ask for but have been categorized by the Dewey Decimal System as being related. And one of these books, from 1988 by a guy named Chuck Hansen, was called US Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History. There's a lot of these kinds of books that come out, but the way this book is written it's meant to be, “I've got the secrets. Let me show you the secrets.”

HANNAH: That's historian Alex Wellerstein, an assistant professor of science and technology at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He's also the author of Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States. Alex has been thinking about secrets for a long time. It's a fascination which began with a book he happened upon during a trip to the library as an undergraduate.

WELLERSTEIN: He has these drawings in there—these amazing drawings, almost like blueprints for the first nuclear weapons. There's one of them in particular, which is of the Nagasaki bomb, fat man. It's drawn in a super precise engineering style—the very thin lines, a million little callout numbers to every little part of the bomb. And I kept looking at this thing and thinking, wow, how much of this is real? How much of this is made up? When did it become possible for somebody to publish that the Fat Man bomb had this doohickey at this size in this place?

HANNAH: That book totally enthralled Alex, and he needed answers. So, he went ahead and tracked down its author, Chuck Hansen.

WELLERSTEIN: He was one of these people I call a secret-seeker. He really saw value in trying to find secrets for their own sake. And the diagram was drawn by a guy who worked at the publisher. Hansen gave him all of this reference information, and then this other guy created a composite—some of it's real, and some of it's imagined. And the way he described it—I just love this phrase—is he said, “The drawing advertises an accuracy it does not have.” And I thought, that's such a good metaphor for a lot of the secret stuff, right? This is what made me realize the secrecy was a fascinating area to drill down to, because it's not just the policies and the laws. It's all of the epiphenomenal stuff that comes out of it, including the desire of this guy to draw this diagram to proclaim he has the secrets.

HANNAH: As details of the Mar-a-Lago scandal surface, it's easy to speculate on what might be in those classified documents which were held in the boxes confiscated by the FBI and President Trump's motivations for keeping them. But presidents deal with a lot of paper, paper which contains secrets both big and small, and perhaps it's those small secrets that somehow interested Trump the most.

WELLERSTEIN: Let's imagine he has the president's daily briefs in there, which are intelligence briefs. Some of those he might have because item A is “Kim Jong-un loves the president,” but item D might be, “We have a defector in Iran who is highly ranked, who has given us this information.” So, item D might be the thing that makes it really classified. Item A might be the reason he has it. I don't think he's a clever man, but I think he's aware enough to know that if he wanted to sell things to the Saudis, it's not going to be him grubbing some papers in the White House and then trying to sell them to the Saudis. That just isn't how that process would go, and the liabilities would be too high.

HANNAH: So, how does a national security secret become a secret? What does it really mean for information to be, quote unquote, “classified.”

WELLERSTEIN: The way in which the legal edifice of classification is built up is there are people who decide what is classified and not classified, called original classifiers, and all original classifying authority derives from the president. So, if the president wanted to, he could declare something secret or declare it declassified. And he can totally do that by fiat, by executive order, does not need to go to Congress, doesn't need to run it by agencies, but does need to document it.

HANNAH: While a former president no longer has the authority to declassify information, it's not uncommon for a sitting president to do so. In the 1990s, President Clinton declassified a whole swath of documents from World War II. And in the 1960s, President Kennedy wanted to give a speech on the nuclear state of the world, and to do that, he had to declassify a single sentence.

Interlude featuring archival audio

WELLERSTEIN: You could work backwards and figure out what the total stockpiles were if you did one of these math problems. But that's the kind of thing a president might want: “I want to put this in my speech.”

Maybe your agencies tell you, “Well, Mr. President, we don't really know if that's a good idea.”

And the president has a lot of leeway to say, “Well, I think it is a good idea. I'm more important than your agencies. I run the show, so here you go.”

But that sentence is not just declassified in that speech. That information is declassified everywhere. So, there's a rippling effect. In the Department of Energy, when something is declassified, a little tiny memo is sent out to everybody that says, “This sentence is now declassified.” And it's sometimes very humorous because it's just the times you think, what is the sentence even saying? It'll be some weird little sentence, and you don't know the context. But we have declassified this sentence. You cannot elaborate on it. It's declassified. And if there's no paper trail, then it is kind of a “if tree falls in a forest.” But if you declassify somebody and nobody knows, have you really declassified it? I think legally, no. So, I don't think you can have a secret declassification.

HANNAH: As President, Donald Trump also had a record of revealing secrets in a somewhat cavalier way, ones which might not have gone through the usual channels and processes. There was that one time where he tweeted a photo of a bombing site in Iran. He essentially was trying to take credit for it. This laissez faire approach to declassification was probably at least a little startling to those who have sworn themselves to what could be a lifetime of secrecy.

WELLERSTEIN: I talk to a lot of people who used to be in the classified world, and they don't want to talk to me at all a lot of the time because they don't know where the line is. And they've been basically told if you stray even close to that line, the hammer is going to come down, even though the hammer rarely comes down for things of this nature. Usually, if it's an accidental disclosure, it's a little administrative problem. You could lose a clearance and have to reapply, but nobody goes to jail for that kind of stuff. But they're deadly afraid of it

HANNAH: So, we've come back to the obvious part. Secrets have power. They can tantalize and drive us in search of hidden answers, like Alex in the hunt to find Charles Hansen. But they also have the ability to silence those in the know and scare those who aren't. But when it comes to national security secrets, there are bigger things at play. America's declassification system is a double-edged sword, and the public exposure of classified information can put security of the country at risk. But what if secrecy impedes global cooperation and the ability for government officials to do their jobs? And does secrecy come at the expense of values and principles which essentially make a democracy, a democracy? These are real tensions, ones the Biden administration is grappling with on a day-to-day basis, even as the Mar a Lago scandal plays out. President Biden is attempting to reform America's classification system. He could make it more transparent for members of America's sprawling national security bureaucracy to share sensitive information among one another and with US allies. With all of that, we turn now to Alex's take on America's secrecy regime.

WELLERSTEIN: It's tricky because on the one hand, I'm not some big defender of the secrecy system, and I think we have many things that are over-classified. And I don't think we need to necessarily hold up the idea that this is classified and thus it is a true threat to our national security and our interests and things. If something is top secret, it's supposed to be so damaging that if it got out—that top secret category was created in World War II for things like D-Day plans. And you could make the argument if the Germans knew exactly where we were landing and when on D-Day, D-Day is sunk, and that screws up the whole liberation of Western Europe. So, that's pretty top secret. Catastrophic damage would happen, but now it's applied to so many things. It's really hard when you see some of these things that have been previously labeled top secret. Really? This is what was going to bring down the Western world?

HANNAH: I guess what I'm what I'm wondering is—the potential political fallout of this isn't going to be so great if people are skeptical of secrecy and authority anyway. Are people going to start putting him in the category of—I don't know—Edward Snowden or something?

WELLERSTEIN: Yeah. I mean, he's not a whistleblower. He hasn't released the documents. It's not like he kept them because he thought the American people wanted and needed to know them. But, right, you should be skeptical of secrecy. On the other hand, you don't want the president of all people, one, to be setting the example of, “Eh, it's no big deal.” Some secrets do seem to have value, and you probably do want them. Lives would be lost if they're released. Like, if we have a person in Russia who's close to Putin, you don't want Putin to know that. So, you could imagine some of these are in the category of “even if we’re skeptical of secrecy, we can agree these are information that maybe won't kill the United States but would be against things most people would agree are good.”

The other issue, though, I think is bigger. Trump does not have a good history of knowing what to tell and who to tell things to. He would have conversations with the Russian ambassador, with nobody else around taking notes. Even if that conversation is 100% innocuous, even if it's a conversation about how great Donald Trump's hair is, you don't want the perception of misdeeds. You don't want the blackmail potential. There's a lot of things you don't want in that. It's just tremendously irresponsible.

So, is this, to me, the defining crime of Donald Trump and his scandals? No, not at all. This is really low on the totem pole, like mishandling classified information. Just put that in the pile of things. But the funny thing about this one is it is so legally laid out what you were allowed to do with documents that I suspect some people are hoping this will be the IRS for Al Capone problem.

HANNAH: So, zooming out for a minute, let's take the focus off Trump. First of all, you use the phrase a lot. You call it the secrecy regime. In a word, in a sentence or two, just define that for us.

WELLERSTEIN: I use the term secrecy regime because it's really easy to see secrecy in purely metaphorical terms. We usually use metaphors. We talk about leaks, which is a liquid metaphor. We talk about the wall of secrecy and the cloak of secrecy and all this kind of stuff. And the more I was looking at secrecy, the more I realized you have to make it concrete in the world. And so, for me, a secrecy regime are all of the pieces you need in place to make your goal of secrecy real. So, your goal of secrecy is going to be something like, “I don't want somebody to know this bit of information.” Or, “I only want a few people to know this information but nobody else.” And it's a whole bunch of practices, as I put it. It's things like a law which says if you give away this information, you go to jail. It's a way of labeling the information so everybody knows what information is secret and what information is not secret. It's background checks so only people who meet certain criteria get access to it. It's all of these things that make the goal real in the world. That's what I call the regime.

HANNAH: Nuclear secrecy is a very specific thing, and it has a very particular and interesting history. Can you just talk on the history of nuclear secrecy?

WELLERSTEIN: One thing, just to back up a little bit, which I think was surprising to me and would be surprising to other people—secrecy, as we know it, is very recent in American history. It does not go back to the founding fathers. It does not go back to the Civil War. The type of secrecy where the government can say, “I am generating documents, and if you give them away, you can have consequences,” essentially dates to around World War I. Some of the earliest secrecy was more like pictures of ports. That’s a secret, right? But weapons information—that essentially dates to World War I. And that's when special wonder weapons start becoming part of the military imaginations, specifically submarines, gas warfare, Zeppelin, tanks, etc. And so, a lot of this infrastructure get put in place for secrecy, including secret laboratories and things like that for making gas weapons. But then because the war ended so quickly, all that sort of fell apart. Most of this stuff was released immediately afterwards.

World War II, though, you have these people who are sort of veterans of the World War I experience in administrative roles, and they believe science and technology is going to win this war. And that's the case in Germany. That's the case in America. That’s the case in the UK in particular. And so, they get quite a lot of influence into organizing approaches to mobilizing American science and technology to win this war. And you get all sorts of stuff out of that: rockets in Germany, radar, cryptography, and eventually the atomic bomb is one of these things as well. And one of the things they're really concerned about is the secrecy of these kinds of things. So, the secrecy infrastructure created in World War I just balloons in World War II, and Roosevelt sort of upgrades some aspects of it, creates new categories of secrecy, comes up with essentially the model we have now where there are certain categories—confidential, secret, eventually top secret. And this ends up carrying through into the postwar period, in part because that infrastructure's already there, but also because people really believe, somewhat erroneously, there's a formula for the atomic bomb. There's a secret for the bomb, which is to say people believe the creation of the bomb is rooted in information.

HANNAH: Like a proprietary recipe, like Coca-Cola kind of.

WELLERSTEIN: Exactly that. If you have this big formula, you have the bomb. That's not how nuclear weapons work. There are lots of formulae, to be sure, but it isn't that kind of technology. The formula can all be just re-derived. And there were scientists at the time who tried to emphasize this to people, and people were saying, “This is the wrong way to think about this weapon. If you try to control its information, you're going to fail. You're not going to control the weapon at all that way.” But there's this almost religious feeling of “the secret” becomes the concern by the late forties. We don't want to lose “the secret.”

HANNAH: And this coincided with advancements in science and nuclear energy. So, even if you weren't working for the government, if you were a private individual and didn't regulate this correctly, you could get executed, right? I mean, by the government.

WELLERSTEIN: In principle. In 1946, Congress passes a law called the Atomic Energy Act, and it creates an entirely new classification system just for nuclear weapons—separate from all other secrets—called restricted data. You and I cannot generate top secret information between the two of us just coming up with ideas right here, because we don't have clearances. We don't have access. That has to be done by somebody in the government using government-derived information. But you and I could come up with restricted data because that's defined as sort of an inherent property of anything related to nuclear weapons, essentially, that's not declassified. It is by default restricted data. We could do some math and come up with our own nuclear weapon design. Great. That would technically be restricted data under this law. And yeah, up until 1969, one of the consequences for deliberately giving that to another nation would be execution. I mean, that's pretty incredible.

HANNAH: And it seems like this secrecy regime and the advent of secrecy was quickly succeeded by a movement toward freedom of information. And so, we see the Freedom of Information Act and all these things coming out later to deal with the problems of too much secrecy or just the inherent Democratic conundrum of transparency and secrecy. I mean, can you talk a little bit about that tension and how it's historically been resolved or not resolved?

WELLERSTEIN: Yeah. So, there's no secrecy in the US Constitution. But there is freedom of publication and freedom of speech and things like that. And in the end, that's sort of the contradiction. Secrecy is relatively recent. It is not part of the starter kit for the United States of America, which is this enlightenment, John Lockean information. Transparency is good. Information needs to be free. It's a very 18th century document, but in terms of its idea of what a state should be, it's not a monarchy. And part of that is an idea of openness and freedom and publication, whereas the legal precedent for the government—

HANNAH: Sorry, let me just ask you real quick: Do you think secrecy is inherently anti-democratic?

WELLERSTEIN: Secrecy is to some degree inherently anti-democratic. Many things could be inherently anti-democratic to some degree, whether it's big enough or bad enough. But yes, if you are trying to say the people who are working in a country need to have information about how the country is working in order to choose what direction the country is going in—if they're being denied fundamental information about how their country is working, then there's no way they're going to be able to make their judgments accordingly. And I will just say also, sometimes it's deliberately anti-democratic. Roosevelt wanted the atomic bomb to be extremely secret. It's not because Roosevelt really feared the atomic bomb was going to destroy the planet or anything. This was still very speculative at the point he made it. It was because he didn't think Congress would want to fund the atomic bomb. The people working on this believe you would never be able to justify the expenditures in an open democratic forum on this science fiction weapon. And that's a literally deliberately anti-democratic measure to get some result.

HANNAH: This is fascinating. I will also say nuclear secrecy is not inherently a national problem or a national challenge. And there are other nuclear powers, friends and allies like the UK and France. First of all, how does our secrecy regime compare to theirs, and what kind of cooperation or coordination happens between these countries?

WELLERSTEIN: In terms of the levels and respect and things, the US has always been the most uptight about trying to use secrecy towards its aims, though paradoxically, it's the most open of the nuclear nations at this point, in part because of this freedom of information. You can get so much more information about American nuclear history. You know how much information you can get about Chinese nuclear history? Like one book's worth, and it's all filtered through the party. And how about Israel's nuclear program? They don't even acknowledge they have nuclear weapons. To me, it's one of the great paradoxes. I spent a lot of time talking about American nuclear secrecy and how big it is and etc. I can get all sorts of information to tell my story. I would never be able to write my book about France. They are much more secretive. Even the UK is much more secretive, though they are more similar to the United States. And of course China, Russia, etc. In Russia we can only write about certain periods because in the 1990s, for a brief window, they declassified a huge amount of information going up to about 1953. But after 1953, it dries up real quick. It's much harder to get information.

So, the US does have some provisions for exchanging nuclear secret information and restricted data with certain allies, but it's under very specific circumstances. We can exchange some information with the British. Our nuclear programs are relatively entwined. If we needed to, the Department of Defense and the president can authorize giving, say, NATO information that we would otherwise want to stay classified, but most of the time we don't give them restricted data. We say it's got to be kept in the United States. We don't want to distribute that. If we want to take it out of that category, we have other ways of distributing classified information. But this is a more cumbersome thing when it comes to international arrangements, and it is tricky. It's often viewed by our allies as counterproductive, especially allies who are not nuclear weapons states. When the US has tried to negotiate, for example, with the Netherlands over gas centrifuge development, the Dutch were basically saying, “We don't really want your secrecy system. We don't build nuclear weapons. We're not going to do what you do.” And that inhibited some of the types of interactions which could be had because they resented the American attitude being imposed upon them. And this has been the case especially in the Cold War. A lot of Western European countries we want to collaborate with don't want to go down this path. They don't do this. They don't feel it is urgent to worry about.

HANNAH: Why not? Because they think it's somehow less democratic, or they just don't have the bureaucratic capacity to enforce that kind of secrecy?

WELLERSTEIN: They see this kind of secrecy as being not only less democratic, but sort of anti-scientific, anti-commercial, which it is. It's all of these things. And it's not so much that they don't value national security, it's that they are not as sold on the idea that this information is as catastrophic as it is assumed to be in the United States. I think that's a really interesting little thing to bring up. How dangerous is secret information? Americans are sort of conditioned to think you could have a secret the whole fate of the world would hinge on. How many movies do we have about that? And there may be a couple of things in that category, though even those are probably more limited, like the D-Day plans. But it's actually hard to make that argument if you really start breaking it down.

There's a case in 1979 where an activist wanted to publish how a hydrogen bomb worked, and the Department of Energy tried to use the restricted data clause to censor him. And they were initially successful. They got a stay order on the publication. But then in the appeal it became clear that what seemed like an obvious assertion was not so obvious. They asserted that if the world knew how to make hydrogen bombs, these multi megaton weapons, that would be dangerous. Hundreds of millions of lives could be at stake. And that sounds sort of initially plausible. But if you start going through how many steps between them seeing a drawing of an H-bomb to global thermonuclear war, you're talking about millions of little actions that have to happen in between those. And making a case that, actually, this would even happen is extraordinarily speculative. It's not clear and present danger at all. I think Americans are more conditioned to believe there's a clear and present danger. I think there are some countries, especially some European countries, who are skeptical of this, and they prioritize some of these other things higher.

HANNAH: This is a good closing question, which is—the big Achilles’ heel is that if you really didn't try to police the world, then you have to be somewhat sanguine about nuclear proliferation. Eventually you're not going to be able to contain countries who want to get nuclear weapons, and eventually everybody wants to get nuclear weapons. And so, the question I have is: in 200 years from now when the technology is more common and the means are more available, do you see this as a historical inevitability where, despite all these attempts to slow the pace of proliferation, eventually many affluent countries are going to have nuclear technology. But is that inherently a bad thing? You study this stuff intimately. You seem to be on the side of a little bit more skeptical of these secrecy regimes from an analytical perspective. What's your take on all this?

WELLERSTEIN: I don't see anything as historically inevitable. To me, the study of history shows you choices are being made all the time. And some of those choices—you cannot predict where they're going to go, and they can amplify some trend or another trend. And I certainly don't think mass proliferation is any more inevitable than mass disarmament. These are all within the categories of things that are totally plausible. Whether they are going to happen, I don't know. I don't think they’re going to happen tomorrow. But there's no reason to think you couldn't do this. You could create regimes where everybody would just agree we're not going to do this and create circumstances in which they didn't want to do this. So, the reason nobody in Latin America has nuclear weapons is not because the United States is constantly monitoring them and bullying them. It's because they signed a nuclear weapons-free zone treaty. They all agreed they didn't really need to do this, and they're focusing all their attentions on other things. It's not because they all get along. It's not because they're all singing Kumbaya by the fire. It's because they prosecute their grievances and their problems in some means that don't involve nuclear weapons. And nuclear weapons wouldn't really help them with that and, in fact, might make things more difficult.

I think there's all sorts of possibilities. I'd like to believe—and this is just hopeful—that you could have a world without needing nuclear weapons in the sense that you could have a world in which people were not afraid their nations would be existentially threatened by other nations, which is the number one security justification for these weapons. And that may or may not be a great world for all people. But you could imagine a world in which that was the case, because that's the case for most nations, with a few exceptions at the moment.

But if you want to talk about really long horizons—200 years or something like that—nuclear weapons are one form of existential, massive casualty technology. Their major benefit as a technology, in a way, is that they're so overkill they induce some restraint. I'm not claiming I have absolute faith that deterrence would work forever. I don't. I actually don't think it's a good idea if more countries get nuclear weapons. But you could imagine—and science fiction writers have been doing this for ages—weapons which do not necessarily have that level of restraint inducement. That would be much more complicating. Nanotechnology weapons or something like this could dramatically shift everything around. So, who knows for 200? I don't know. I don't think it's inevitable, though. There's a lot of science fiction which is written on the idea that in the far future, people will have nukes, but they're not that big of a deal because they're not actually the anchor around which national security is rooted. There are other issues that are going to come up, and I don't find that totally implausible because they are not very useful as tools to have compared to a lot of other capabilities.

HANNAH: I'm Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. Thanks so much for listening, and thanks to Alex for joining us today. Thanks also go out to the None of the Above team who make all of this possible. Thanks to our producer, Caroline Gray, our associate producer and editor, Sarah Leeson, and for research and writing support from Lucas Robinson. I also want to thank my colleague, Zuri Linetsky, for stepping in for me last episode. He was a terrific guest host, and I hope you enjoyed that show. If you enjoyed what you've heard, we would appreciate you subscribing to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Do rate and review us, and if there's a topic you want us to cover, send us an email at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. Thanks for joining us.

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