AN UNCERTAIN TRAIN OF NUCLEAR EVENTS

Abstract

The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation, by Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman. Zenith Press, 2009. 392 pages, $30.

Keywords:

• Nuclear proliferation
• nuclear weapons
• espionage
• Soviet Union
• China

Notes

1. Danny B. Stillman vs. Central Intelligence Agency, et al., U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Civ. No. 01-1342 (EGS), filed March 30, 2007.

2. It is unclear how many of the nineteen were already U.S. citizens by 1943, some having arrived years earlier.

3. Jeremy J. Stone, president of the Federation of American Scientists, accused Philip Morrison of being a Soviet spy but later admitted his mistake. Irwin Goodwin, “New Book Unmasks Scientist X as Spy, but Facts of Case Tell a Different Story,” Physics Today 52 (July 1999), pp. 39–40; Linda Rothstein, “The Perseus Papers,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 1999, pp. 17–19.

4. Robert S. Norris, “An American Scientist, the Soviets, and the H-Bomb,” Huffington Post, December 30, 2008, <www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-s-norris/an-american-scientist-the_b_154307.html>.

5. The best analyses of the Perseus myth are found in Chapter 20 of Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel's 1997 book about Theodore Hall, Bombshell: The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy (New York: Crown, 1997); and Gary Kern, “The Perseus Disinformation Operation,” February 17, 2006, a post on the History of American Communism website, <h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-hoac&month=0602&week=c&msg=Lb%2bREHUoud/%2bSFUeQbPTMA&user=&pw=>. A person with the real Soviet codename “Pers” is often conflated into the longer name Perseus to conclude that “Perseus” must be a real spy. (“Pers” is mentioned in the VENONA papers—some 2,900 encrypted Soviet diplomatic cables that were systematically intercepted and decoded by the United States between 1940 and 1948; portions of several hundred of these decrypted messages were released by the National Security Agency in 1996. “Perseus” is not mentioned in VENONA.) John Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, in their recent book, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), have revealed the real identity of Pers: an obscure engineer named Russell W. McNutt whose life fits none of the Perseus legend.

6. The best analyses of the Perseus myth are found in Chapter 20 of Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel's 1997 book about Theodore Hall, Bombshell: The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy (New York: Crown, 1997); and Gary Kern, “The Perseus Disinformation Operation,” February 17, 2006, a post on the History of American Communism website, <h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-hoac&month=0602&week=c&msg=Lb%2bREHUoud/%2bSFUeQbPTMA&user=&pw=>. A person with the real Soviet codename “Pers” is often conflated into the longer name Perseus to conclude that “Perseus” must be a real spy. (“Pers” is mentioned in the VENONA papers—some 2,900 encrypted Soviet diplomatic cables that were systematically intercepted and decoded by the United States between 1940 and 1948; portions of several hundred of these decrypted messages were released by the National Security Agency in 1996. “Perseus” is not mentioned in VENONA.) John Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, in their recent book, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), have revealed the real identity of Pers: an obscure engineer named Russell W. McNutt whose life fits none of the Perseus legend.

7. John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai, China Builds the Bomb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 230.

8. Reed says elsewhere, “In all likelihood, he [Fuchs] also added his thoughts on the role of radiation pressure in thermonuclear weapons,” yet, as in Nuclear Express, fails to supply adequate sources. Thomas C. Reed, “The Chinese Nuclear Tests, 1964–1996,” Physics Today 61 (September 2008), p. 53.

9. See Old Atlantic Lighthouse, “Thomas C Reed Chinese Nuclear Tests,” December 12, 2008, <oldatlanticlighthouse.wordpress.com/2008/12/12/thomas-c-reed-chinese-nuclear-tests/>.

10. Reed and Stillman do not mention that Harold M. Agnew, former director of the Los Alamos weapon laboratory, was an earlier visitor.

11. See, for example, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao's comments about the “safety” of the $1 trillion China has invested in U.S. government debt. Michael Wines, Keith Bradsher, and Mark Landler, “China's Leader Says He Is ‘Worried’ Over U.S. Treasuries,” New York Times, March 14, 2009, p. A1.

12. Pierre Billaud and Venance Journé, “The Real Story Behind the Making of the French Hydrogen Bomb: Chaotic, Unsupported, but Successful,” Nonproliferation Review 15 (July 2008), pp. 353–72.

13. Scott D. Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 157.

14. Jacqueline Akhavan, The Chemistry of Explosives (London: Royal Society of Chemistry, 2004), p. 42.

15. Jeffrey T. Richelson, Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), pp. 283–316.