Knowledge and the bomb

Alex Wellerstein

This dissertation is a history of nuclear secrecy in the United States, from the Manhattan Project through the "War on Terror." It covers nearly seven decades of the attempts made to control nuclear technology through the control of knowledge, and looks at the overall dynamics of American secrecy policies as they unfolded over the course of the latter-half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. The project examines how nuclear secrecy served as a focal point for competing ideas about the nature of science, technology, and governance, and was a vital site for understanding the ways in which the idea of knowledge as power has been articulated and re-articulated in the years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The chapters attempt to provide a broad framework for periodizing American nuclear secrecy as a non-monolithic, ever-shifting, and always controversial series of...