Alex Wellerstein, "Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

The University of Chicago Press Podcast · May 24, 2021 · 58m

Given the obsession with information and secrecy in today’s world, it can be difficult to imagine a time when governments held few secrets and worried little about what information was public knowledge. In Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Alex Wellerstein chronicles how much of this change can be traced to the development of atomic weapons in the 1940s and the efforts both then and since to restrict the details about them. Secrecy was a factor in nuclear technology from the start, as scientists argued amongst themselves…