Security and the shaping of identity for nuclear specialists

Abstract

Atomic energy developed from 1940 as a subject shrouded in secrecy. Identified successively as a crucial element in military strategy, national status and export aspirations, the research and development of atomic piles (nuclear chain-reactors) were nurtured at isolated installations. Like monastic orders, new national laboratories managed their specialist workers in occupational environments that were simultaneously cosseted and constrained, defining regional variants of a new state-managed discipline: reactor technology. This paper discusses the significance of security in defining the new subject in the USA, UK and Canada – wartime allies with similar political traditions distinct but trajectories in this field during the Cold War. The intellectual borders and content of the subject developed differently in each country, shaped under the umbrella of secrecy by disparate clusters of expertise, industrial traditions, and national goals. The nascent cadre was contained until the mid 1950s by classified publications and state-sponsored specialist courses. The early context of high security filtered its members and capped enduringly both their professional aspirations and public engagement.

Keywords:

• nuclear engineer
• security
• secrecy
• identity
• profession
• atomic energy

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge gratefully the funding of this work by Economic and Social Research Council grant RES-000-22-2171, and the helpful comments of colleagues, three anonymous referees and the editor.

Notes

1. For an overview, see Hughes, ‘Deconstructing the Bomb.’

2. E.g. Strickland, Scientists in Politics; Smith, A Peril and a Hope; Jungk, Brighter Than A Thousand Suns. On contemporary weapons designers, see e.g. Parfit, The Boys Behind the Bombs and Rosenthal, At the Heart of the Bomb.

3. French and Spanish nuclear engineers have been studied as occupational groups in young disciplines in Hecht, The Radiance of France and Barca Salom, ‘Els Inicis de L’Enginyeria Nuclear a Barcelona.’ On American craft and skilled trades workers, see Olwell, At Work in the Atomic City. On Canadian nuclear workers and safety in the context of radiation, see Parr, ‘A Working Knowledge of the Insensible?’

4. The term nucleonics – an early example of specialist vocabulary demarcating the new subject – was coined at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory in 1944. Nuclear engineering as a collective label found increasing use in the USA and Canada from about 1950, but remained uncommon as a descriptor and job category in the UK. On the social construction of the ‘nuclear’ see Hecht, ‘The Power of Nuclear Things.’

5. In the USA, some 400 nuclear professionals – about half of them engineers – were estimated in 1952 and predicted to rise to 2800 by 1958 (Atomic Industrial Forum, A Growth Survey of the Atomic Industry). In the UK Atomic Energy Authority, so-called ‘Qualified Scientists and Engineers’ (QSEs) represented about 12% of the workforce and rose from 2300 to 6300 between 1956 and 1962; during that period, QSEs classified as scientists fell from 2/3 to 1/2 (‘1956–1962 Programmes: Professional Manpower in the Atomic Energy Industry’). Membership in the Institution of Nuclear Engineers rose from 500 to 1100 between 1959 and 1961. By 2010, the ANS and the successor to the INucE, the Nuclear Institute, had some 11,000 and 2800 members, respectively; the Canadian Nuclear Society (founded in 1979 as a learned society rather than a professional qualifying body) has some 1200 members.

6. Shils, The Torment of Secrecy, especially 3.IV, and Moynihan, Secrecy, especially chaps 5–7.

7. E.g. Krige, ‘Atoms for Peace’; Kevles, ‘Cold War and Hot Physics’; Galison and Bernstein, ‘Physics between War and Peace.’ On the framing of secrecy for policy purposes, see Herken, ‘“A Most Deadly Illusion.”’

8. Gusterson, Nuclear Rites, chap. 4; Masco, ‘Lie Detectors.’

9. On analyses of distinctions between engineers on the national scale, see a thematic issue and opening essay of Chatzis, ‘Introduction: The National,’ and Brown, ‘Design Plans.’

10. ‘History of TNX,’ 55.

11. Ibid.

12. The planned production pile would generate some 100,000 curies of radioactivity, the equivalent of 100 kilograms of radium and far in excess of the world’s current supply. Crawford Greenewalt, the Du Pont project leader, noted that ‘because of the complete lack of engineering data and because no pilot plant experiments had been made up to this time, the du Pont Company would, in ordinary circumstances, not touch a project of this nature. The grave physiological hazards involved were emphasized and it was stated that, except for patriotic reasons, the du Pont Company was opposed to having any connection with the attempt to construct and operate [such] plants’ (Greenewalt, ‘Stine’s Memorandum’; Greenewalt, ‘Manhattan Project Diary Vol I,’ 88–91).

13. ‘History of Operations – Administrative,’ 3.

14. 832 vs. 662 workers. ‘History of Operations – Administrative,’ 5.

15. Hales, Atomic Spaces, 118; on other aspects of security, see chap. 5.

16. Newell to Thomson, letter.

17. Founded in 1916, Canada’s NRC engaged in nationally relevant research with a strong complement of engineers and scientists without fixed hierarchy. In the Tube Alloy project as a whole, ICI staff made up more than a third of the total (Eggleston, National Research in Canada; Reader, Imperial Chemical Industries, 287–96; Reader, Imperial Chemical Industries).See also Doern, Science and Politics in Canada and Gingras, ‘The Institutionalization.’

18. Wallace, ‘Atomic Energy in Canada,’ 127. The physicists’ monk-like existence contrasts with the rise of team technoscience common to other parts of the Manhattan Project and described more broadly in Shapin, The Scientific Life.

19. Wallace to Williams, letter.

20. Mackenzie, 18 January 1943 diary. By October 1944, the Anglo-Canadian project included some 140 graduate scientists and engineers, half being Canadian, with 22 British, seven New Zealanders and four French (Cockcroft, ‘Montreal Staff’). In the USA, foreign nuclear workers were quick to adopt American citizenship, particularly in light of suspicions of their allegiances; Eugene Wigner (1937), Edward Teller (1941), Leo Szilárd (1943) and Enrico Fermi (1944) were prominent examples.

21. Williams, ‘The Development of Nuclear.’

22. Anonymous to Mackenzie, memo.

23. Guéron to Mackenzie, memo. See also Hecht, The Radiance of France. The French program was to remain isolated from work in the USA, Canada and Britain after the war, largely because of the pro-communist allegiances of key participants such as Frédéric Joliot.

24. Kowarski, ‘Atomic Energy Developments in France.’ Zoé, the first French reactor, was built at Fort de Châtillon, near Paris, in 1947. Brookhaven, created in 1946, was the first postwar American national laboratory.

25. ’Statement on US Censorship Policy.’

26. A ‘Special Secret Committee,’ established in February 1945, allowed ‘US Military Intelligence and the like to have direct information on what was being done in Canada … . In addition, secret reports on the work done in Canadian laboratories on the development and improvements in analytical techniques and so on have been circulated’ (Thomson to Mackenzie, letter). Seven years later, Mackenzie complained to Canadian Minister C.D. Howe that the information flow still remained imbalanced: ‘in spite of a strong case and an active campaign for cooperation on the part of the American group on reactor design, up to the present time we have had no concessions whatsoever’ (Mackenzie to Howe, letter).

27. Smyth, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes.

28. See, for example, Galison and Hevly, Big Science; Seidel, ‘A Home for Big Science’; Weinberg, Reflections on Big Science.

29. Shils The Torment of Secrecy, 27–33.

30. As Shils notes, ‘Since secrecy is so damaging to solidarity, the mere possession of a secret gives rise to the suspicion of disloyalty’ (The Torment of Secrecy, 35); ‘Within professions and professional societies, within occupational groups … the emergence of an alleged national crisis attenuates autonomy and enfeebles the will to autonomy’ (The Torment of Secrecy, 45).

31. On isolationism, see Shils, The Torment of Secrecy, 86–9.

32. Forman, ‘Behind Quantum Electronics.’

33. DOE, ‘Remarks by Seaborg,’ 6.

34. In particular, by researching the ‘homogeneous reactor,’ a slurry of concentrated uranium circulated in heavy water or molten salts, summarized by Alvin Weinberg as ‘a pot, a pump and a pipe’ (Weinberg, The First Nuclear Era, 116).

35. Needell, ‘Nuclear Reactors.’

36. Argonne had been unsuccessful in monopolizing reactor design owing to the resistance of Oak Ridge, but it segregated engineering to a separate site in Arco, Idaho from 1949 (later known as the National Reactor Test Station, and later still as the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory) (Stacy, ‘Proving the Principle’). As Argonne Director Walter Zinn put it, ‘the testing station will be a place to build reactors and get experience in their operation, rather than to do experiments such as will be done on the research reactor at Argonne by the physicists, chemists and biologists (‘Minutes of Board of Governors’ Meeting, ANL’).

37. Church to Macki, letter; Westwick, The National Labs, 63; Johnston, ‘Making the Invisible Engineer Visible.’

38. Mackenzie to Thode, letter.

39. Lewis to Keys, letter.

40. Bothwell, Nucleus.

41. As the first Chalk River reactor would be 10 times more powerful than the American pilot-plant at Oak Ridge, it was argued that the site should be no closer than 6 km from the township (Bolton to Mackenzie, letter). Similarly, the Windscale production reactors (1950) and Dounreay fast reactor (1959) were sited in sparsely populated Cumbria and the northern tip of Scotland, respectively, owing to engineering estimates of the likelihood of accident (‘Choice of Site for Production Pile 1946’; Hinton, ‘The Birth of the Breeder’).

42. Kinsey, ‘Life at Chalk River’; Behrens, ‘Life at Harwell.’ Unmarried employees of Hanford, Los Alamos and Chalk River were sequestered in single-sex dormitories, however.

43. Dick, ‘The Hangars Hide Uranium Piles,’ 281, 285.

44. Zinn to Harrell, letter.

45. Weinberg, The First Nuclear Era, 38–9.

46. For a detailed account of the American Manhattan project, see Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

47. Cockcroft, ‘The Development’; Bauer and Diamond, ‘Note on Piles.’

48. Galison, ‘Removing Knowledge’; on classification of nuclear knowledge, see 232–5.

49. Beckerley, ‘Declassification of Low-Power Reactors’; Manley, ‘Secret Science.’

50. Argonne National Laboratory, ‘Subcontractor Contract Template.’

51. See, for example, Gowing, Reflections on Atomic Energy History.

52. ‘Secrecy in Nuclear Engineering.’

53. IME Hinton papers, 162.

54. ‘Visits to Scientific Establishments – Oak Ridge Institute.’

55. ‘Draft Operating Policy of the Argonne National Laboratory’; ‘The New Government Employee Security Program.’

56. ‘Security Procedures in the USA’; Hewlett and Holl, Atomic Shield, 88–95.

57. ‘American Scientists Involved in Security Investigations.’

58. Mott, ‘The Scientist and Dangerous Thoughts.’

59. Oak Ridge and Argonne contributed significantly to these postwar organizations. The Association of Oak Ridge Engineers and Scientists, and the Federation of Atomic Scientists, amalgamated earlier groupings of engineers, technicians and scientists. See Smith, A Peril and a Hope, especially chap. 3. In the UK, the Atomic Scientists’ Association (ASA) also represented the technical, social and policy views of engineers in the British program.

60. ‘Hanford Story, chap. 12–14.’ See also Hales, Atomic Spaces, 169–82; Sanger and Mull, Hanford and the Bomb and Olwell, At Work in the Atomic City, esp. chaps 3, 7, and 8.

61. Concerns about unionization were often embedded in the larger-scale governmental mistrust surrounding disarmament and espionage, and was affiliated particularly with conservative political leanings.

62. Hull, Kelley, and Daerr, Intelligence Office, memo; Daerr, Intelligence Office, memo.

63. Mountjoy, memo.

64. ‘Minutes of Board of Governors’ Meeting, ANL.’

65. Rothbaum, The Government of the Oil.

66. Johnston, ‘Creating a Canadian Profession.’

67. For a contemporary British account reflecting popular concerns, see Newman, Soviet Atomic Spies. See also Turchetti, ‘Atomic Secrets and Government Lies.’

68. Wang, American Science.

69. Shils (The Torment of Secrecy, 186) notes that ‘none of the famous scientist spies – Fuchs, Nunn May and Pontecorvo – were American; none of the American spies – Greenglass, Sobel, Gold or Rosenberg – were higher than technicians or engineers’; see Compton, Atomic Quest, 117, for similar distinctions and Hewlett, ‘Beginnings of Development.’

70. ‘The Purge in Britain.’ The same month, weeks after Fuchs’ conviction, the French government dismissed Frédéric Joliot as High Commissioner of Atomic Energy in France owing to his communist associations. Covertly political, rather than engineering, decisions may have been behind the subsequent French adoption of gas–graphite rather than heavy-water reactors (Hecht, ‘Political Designs’).

71. Sir Wallace Akers, former ICI manager of the wartime Tube Alloys project, cautiously asked for guidance about the company’s attitude; ICI, in fact, ‘suggested that it is all to the good for reasonably minded people to become members’ (Akers to Perrin, letters).

72. Hawes, ‘Far too Secret a Secret’; Fishenden, letter.

73. Skinner, ‘Atomic Energy and the Public Interest,’ 271.

74. Cockcroft to France, letter.

75. On the American context, see Glennan, ‘The Engineer in the AEC.’ The two groups remained distinct and mutually exclusive, though. Reflecting the divisions, the Secretary of the Federation of Atomic Scientists proffered that ‘[engineers] are mostly apolitical, but when they do have views there are of a stereotyped conservative nature’ (Meier, ‘The Origins of the Scientific Species,’ 171). On the distinctive political context of American engineers, see Noble, America by Design, which identifies a largely conservative stance allied to corporate interests, while Layton, The Revolt of the Engineers identifies a more socially committed progressivist current.

76. For a special issue devoted to the visa problems created by this ‘American paper curtain,’ see Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 8, no. 1 (October 1952).

77. ‘Freedom in Science.’

78. It also incidentally expanded public mistrust to engineers: Rosenberg was an electrical engineer employed during the war by the Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratory in New Jersey, who obtained Manhattan Project information via his brother-in-law David Greenglass, a machinist.

79. Keys to Editor of Nucleonics, letter.

80. Keys to Cockcroft, letters, 17 July and 8 August 1951.

81. ‘Atomic energy – Canada – General – US Atomic Energy Commission liaison officer at Chalk River’; Mather, ‘Report of Visit to Chalk River Ontario.’ According to one staff member there, the roles of the liaison officer at Chalk River and contacts at the US national laboratories included espionage, revealing ‘an undercurrent of distrust between the two projects’ (Wallace, ‘Atomic Energy in Canada,’ 128).

82. Manley, ‘Secret Science’; Beckerley, ‘Declassification of Low-Power Reactors.’

83. Wende, ‘Meetings at Argonne’; Woodhouse, ‘Brookhaven Fuel Elements.’

84. Wende, ‘Visit to Schenectady.’

85. Indeed, personal notebooks had been prohibited during the Manhattan Project, and course notes were similarly classified (Gerber, On the Home Front, 45–8).

86. Nichols, Nucleonics, 91–2.

87. News item, ‘Training Nuclear Engineers at Oak Ridge’; Atomic Energy Commission, ‘Oak Ridge Operations Information Manual’; Hewlett and Holl, The New World, 184–5.

88. Argonne National Laboratory, School of Nuclear Science and Engineering, 3, 9.

89. On the origins of nuclear education, see Johnston, ‘Implanting a Discipline’ and Herran, ‘Spreading Nucleonics.’

90. The Journal of Reactor Science and Technology – a classified publication – was disseminated quarterly by Oak Ridge National Laboratory from the early 1950s.

91. Soodak and Campbell, Elementary Pile Theory, vii.

92. ‘Dana Engineering and Design History – Girdler Corp.’

93. ‘Dana Engineering and Design History – Lummus Co.’

94. Eisenhower Administration, ‘Project “Candor.”’

95. Eisenhower, ‘Atoms for Peace’; Eisenhower Administration, ‘General Outline for Agronsky Program.’

96. Plowden in Jay, Calder Hall, v. In Canada, the expansion of the atomic energy project strained the NRC and led to creation of a new Crown corporation, Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd (AECL) to assume management.

97. Weinberg, The First Nuclear Era, 170.

98. Semenovsky, Conquering the Atom.

99. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 361–2.

100. See early issues for its developing aims: Pinkerton, ‘The Institution of Nuclear Energy Engineers’; ‘The Birth of the Institution.’ Its more frankly profession-oriented stance attracted considerable international membership – nearly half of it from the USA – in the early years of the INucE, unlike the nationally oriented ANS.

101. Abbott, The System of Professions.

102. Cockcroft, ‘Foreword.’

103. ‘Editorial’.

104. ‘Another Industrial Revolution?’

105. Cockcroft, ‘The Harwell Reactor School.’

106. Hinton, ‘Inaugural Address.’

107. ‘Special Issue: Secrecy, Security, and Loyalty.’

108. ‘Secrecy Wraps Lifted.’

109. Curtiss and Nightingale, ‘Trip Report US–UK Graphite Conference.’

110. ‘Apology for Impression Possibly Given.’

111. ‘The Atomic Scientists Association Ltd: Policy and Associated Correspondence’; ‘Atomic Scientists Association’s General Correspondence.’ See also Hodgson, ‘The British Atomic Scientists’ Association.’

112. ‘1960 Minister’s Case: Security Clearance for Process Workers.’

113. ‘National Union of Atomic Workers 1958–63’; ‘1961 Minister’s Case: National Union of Atomic Workers.’

114. ‘Nuclear Engineers and the Trades Unions.’ The unions representing INucE members included the Association of Scientific Technical and Managerial Staffs; Technical, Administrative and Supervisory Section of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers the Engineers’ and Managers’ Association (EMA) and the UK Association of Professional Engineers (UKAPE).

115. Moss, ‘The Crisis of Secrecy’; Seidel, ‘Secret Scientific Communities’; Galison, ‘Removing Knowledge.’

116. Minutes, Board of Governors, ‘Tripartite Contract Problem.’

117. Johnston, ‘Angio-Saxon Atom Men’.

118. Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, Secrecy: Report of the Commission, xxi.

119. On the relevance of local perspectives over national ones, see Pyenson, ‘An End to National Science.’

120. This occupational dimension is relatively unexplored in Hughes, ‘Technological Momentum.’

121. Shils, The Torment of Secrecy, Sections 2-II and 2-IV.