thank you so much for joining us thank you for having me and so what is your area of specialty i'm a historian of science which means that in the way that somebody who might be a historian of america would study the history of say the country of the united states or historian of europe would sir study the history of europe i study the history of science and technology so it goes across borders and goes across time periods it's not your every day field of history most people don't know about it but it's extremely fun because you get to look at all sorts of different ways in which science technology has impacted human society over the ages and one of the areas that you specialize in is nuclear weapons and nuclear secrecy so can you talk a little bit about that my specific area is the history of nuclear weapons where secrecy nuclear secrecy is the attempts to control knowledge as a means of controlling the spread of technology and today in our modern  society we take secrecy for granted of course there's a lot of secrecy ago course the government doesn't tell you everything of course if something is dangerous knowledge about it should be controlled but interestingly it's relatively recent that we have this kind of secrecy  basically of th century the kind of secrecy that we live in today did not really exist until world war two so within living memory and the choice to try and control technology to control a weapon to control something that you could build with your hands or blueprints the choice to use knowledge is the what we call the vector as the means of controlling it that's very unintuitive in many ways the scientists who build the bomb did not think secrecy was going to be the way they controlled it they had other schemes in mind but we went down a very different path and the one thousand nine hundred and forty s and so i like to look at explore this path and also make it seem less natural to us today even though that's the path we're still on can you give us some examples of some of the secrecy regarding nuclear weapons today today there's a lot of things secret about nuclear weapons still some of it has specific designs for how they work so some of those design concepts for the early bombs are not secret anymore you can look them up go on with a pedia and find them some of them the details even the substances inside the weapons are completely classified so we know that there's a substance inside modern nuclear weapons mother american nuclear weapons were only knows its code name its code name is fog bank very evocative and it's so secret that in the early two thousand this government scientists decided they were going to have to recreate it at the old stuff that was in the weapons would need to be remade and they realize they didn't know how to make it any more they actually kept it secret from themselves they had not preserved enough information about it and they had to spend quite a lot of money building up a new version of the same old substance and so we can talk about this is that there was a substance that they forgot how it was made what is the substance that's the secret but there's speculation but we don't know what it is we don't know what it does but we just know that it's something that's inside the bomb so there's a lot of different levels of secrecy from the very technical details up to questions like where are all of our nuclear weapons we have some that we store in europe where exactly that's technically secret even though we have pretty good ideas about where they are how many nuclear weapons we have used to be secret we used to we had pretty good guesses as to what it was and in two thousand and ten the obama administration said here's the number five thousand something and said that that was no longer a secret anymore even though that used to be considered one of the most closely kept secrets and so the line between what the secret and what isn't secret shifts quite a bit over time and even in our present day it could be argued that something such as how to build a bomb would be ok to keep secret you know but what elements do you think threaten democracy by being secret so even with something like how to build a bomb there's a lot of overlap there between how to run a nuclear reactor and so with the science and technology it's not always clear that you can put the dangerous stuff into one box and say this is very secret nobody should have access to this there are some things that are published abroad by people in other countries should they still be secret in this country and just to point out when we make something secret we mean that if you publish about it or talk about it you can go to jail so there's big stakes it's not just holding it together you know it's not just the government saying i'm not going to tell you this thing it's consequences for people who want to work in these areas of science and technology or talk about them even with journalists as for the effects on democracy if people don't know what we're doing with our nuclear weapons what are they hand out or are they aimed at cities are they aimed at military bases under what conditions would do we think we would use a nuclear weapon or would we not if we don't know that sort of thing it means we're entrusting all those decisions the people at the very top of the governmental pyramid and who are those peoples of them might be people would imagine like the president some of them might be people in the military some of them might be people at agencies that most people don't even know exist so it's a it's a there's a direct conflict between sort of the democratic a deal of an informed public of a public that's taking part in decisions and electing people who it thinks are going to make certain decisions over others and secrecy if you talk to government representatives they will say we knowledge this completely there's always going to be a tradeoff between sort of open discussion and the needs of security the problem i think that has become really evident is that as people on the outside of the secrecy system we don't know where the people on the inside are claiming that trade off is taking place we don't know where they're going to draw the line and if we don't know what they are what their criteria is even for drawing that line then it's very hard for us to have any kind of participation in questions that go from either the bomb you know to driving the bombs there are towns is that safe we don't know we can't ask that question we can ask questions about whether you know they're tapping our phone calls or monitoring their internet usage if we don't know that they've decided that that's part of something that they need to do for security so there is a hampering effect there always will be it doesn't mean that you the answer is get rid of all secrecy though it does mean i think that we put so much trust in a couple of these institutions that have almost nobody checking what they're doing and you have a wonderful blog that attempts to bring the public into this whole idea can you talk about your blog a little bit so my blog restricted data the nuclear secrecy blog is i've been running it now for about four years or so and it's very popular it's got more popular yet for the work of a professor usually of her free and academic r r r tickles take years to write and are seen by a couple  dozen people and are written in a very jargony hard to access fashion the blog is seen at the moment by on a regular day about two thousand people a day and why do you think that is there's a lot of interest in nuclear history i try to write about it in a way that will be interesting to people who don't know too much about it but also people who know quite a bit are already interested so the blog is a place where i talk about research questions it's a place where i talk about sort of big sometimes it's a place where i like to ask little questions and see if i can come up with an answer so one of the ones i did exactly at what point did the american scientists know that there was no nazi atomic bomb because the justification for the american manhattan project to build the atomic bomb was that there was going to get a bomb but at some point we realized that it wasn't going to bomb and you know and so by the end of the world we knew that their programmed it had gone anywhere so at what point did they know that didn't change anything that we did and it turns out that's a very complicated question because they had indications that there was a bomb but they didn't under present know there was an a bomb and so this is a place to talk about what kind of sources we have what kind of information the americans had on the german program but it's also a place to talk about how the term know do they know something that this isn't just a state of yes or no sometimes you kind of suspect but i have reasons to doubt your knowledge or sometimes you might have some evidence but think that you might be missing the key evidence that knowledge itself is a sort of slippery concept that time so this is the sort of thing i like to do on the block where we have a very specific historical question and we have some documents and i always post the documents because i want people to see what is the stuff that history is made of and you can go on there and read the documents yourself and see how messy they are on the say top secret and they have things hostile as it's fun to read these old documents but i also want to poke at it in a way that i'm sort of a professional historian  which is to ask these sort of deeper almost philosophical questions about what do we mean when we say when did they know do we mean when did they have confidence that their intelligence was one hundred percent accurate and when they didn't and didn't have any more doubt about a german bomb and that's a very slippery as we know in our day to day lives life doesn't always come down to such a simple yes no state of things and clearly probably today the same issues are going on  scientist on the manhattan project really interesting character lots of biographies about him a lot of people like to quote him he's interesting because most people get him quite wrong we like to fit historical characters historians like to call them historical actors which is i think appropriate into a narrative in thomas like a play and we like to have things that go rise and fall we like to have heroes who bite off more than they can true we like to have villains but real life is full of really  complicated conflicted people the people we know in our lives are not all good or not all bad right they don't they're not always consistent so oppenheimer's extremely consistent over the course of his life sometimes he seems to be almost the conscience of the people working on the bombs and at the same time he could turn around and recommend that they drop the bombs on cities which is what he did during the war and sometimes he looks like he regrets having made the bombs and then he'll turn around and say it in our growth that he can look like somebody who pushes back against the military in the new go into the files and he found that he ratted out every single one of his friends and even his family members to the f b i and cause them a huge amount of grief and so i'd like him because he's he's a real human being he's got all those complexities and the more i look into what that's motivating him is it's this very complex psychology and it's a guy who wants to belong and his whole life if you read it through this lens he always wants to belong and a place where people are not always sure that they want him and this leads him to do things like cozy up to the military even though they are very antagonistic to his his world view but he wants the belong there and be important so we view him as a very simple sometimes a pacifist he's not a pacifist we view him as a martyr he would not  him self as a martyr at all and so just to bring him around to your question about the nuclear disarmament movement we have a lot of narratives going on we always like to see ourselves in some sort of trajectory and to think that everything all the issues in the world boiled down very simply  from a historical point of view when you're really trying to go back in and look at things as they are not something that was fit whatever my current day politics are you find messiness everywhere you find people who don't know the future you find people who don't know the right answer in some ways it's disappointing because we don't get that nice clean narrative that we like to tell we don't get that good rise and fall story or that constantly overcoming obstacles and being superior story that one of the few classic human narrative tropes but on the other hand we also see people who look like real human beings and see people that we recognize oh that reminds me of uncle so and so and his confliction some things like that so i think that's a good trade off today i would say that we also don't associate secrecy and also psychological challenges of those who have nuclear weapons with nuclear weapons but clearly that applies today as well now on your blog you've got a wonderful two a we've got many wonderful tools but you've also got nuke map that helps people today actually invision what this thing and so can you talk a little bit about that sure so one of the problems with nuclear weapons is that fortunately we don't encounter their expects plosive power on a day to day basis right fortunately they're in a what we call a realm of energy that is not part of our day to day human experience and that's a good thing we don't want to live in a world in which that is part of our day to day human experience but it can make it very hard to wrap one's head around these things so lots of people have seen pictures of nuclear bombs going off or both or film them going off but it can be very hard to get a sense of scale most of our nuclear bomb tests are in the middle of a desert or on an island in the middle of the ocean not a city for obvious reasons so i created the new map a way for people to help them visualize this to visualize the destructive power what would happen if a bomb went off over my city or near my city or over somebody else's city whatever you want to do you pick the options you can pick the type of bomb you can have it be the very  nuclear bomb which i call the gadget i think you have this scroll down thing you pick your body pick your body you could pick up bomb that's the biggest bomb that the americans ever made the biggest bomb the soviets ever made you could pick a bomb from the current chinese are some only you could pick a bomb that the u  and it will show you a series of rings and they will say this is the house size of a fireball anything inside this fireball be obliterated here's a pressure ring for a very high amount of pressure twenty pounds per square inch which the caption tells you that's enough to destroy pretty much any building some military bunkers can withstand that but a skyscraper building a commercial building industrial building destroyed even if it's standing it's gutted five pounds per square inch of destroyed houses so five pounds per square inch of pressure  will knock down a wooden structure there's a line for how much radio for radiation or if you survive everything else you'll get radiation sickness and die in a couple of weeks very pleasantly and there's a line that shows you the range of thirty degree burns which was you know burns that will burn your skin down to the nerves cause you disfigurement and maybe even be fatal you can also pick other options you can have a tell you the number of casualties and fatalities you can have it tell you whether there would be a lot of radiation blowing downwind and where approximately the what approximately the size of the contamination would be and again the goal here is to help people visualize it and let people i hesitate to use the word but play a little bit right because we have a lot of research that says if people get to choose their own parameters and learning about something they learn it deep it's different than if i just tell you oh yes this is what would happen but if you've learned something because you chose all of the variables people the come away and say oh yeah hiroshima size bomb kind of a punch out the downtown of a city like new york or any major metropolitan area but a big thermonuclear weapons would destroy the whole metropolitan area and those little bombs they don't really destroy a whole lot but they could be used to attack track tanks or troops or things that so my understanding is that nuke map has grown organically really quickly yes it's extremely popular so some ten million or more people have used it since i created it and if you look at the graph of usage over time what you get are these little spikes from it being featured in news media or to be on social media in some big way and then after that you get what they call in the industry the  tail so it goes up on a kind of grows out out out but what's really interesting about new map is each of those long declines of usage is higher than the one previous to it and then leads to another spike so overall there are more people using it average per day now no way more than when it st came out or even during some of the times of its highest amounts of publicity it gets a lot of just people every day at the moment it's around eighteen thousand people a day are going see things blow up you know so to what extent do you think people are going there for some kind of learning deep experience and or to what extent they just want to see new york blow up i keep track of what people do with a tool and i have two types of usage bracket out one is what i call experience so this is your blowing up yourself blowing up space is that you know to get a sense of the actual size of the ball and you know where they're from their ip or something like that right exactly at the browser tells me what country you're and you can tell me more  as what region you're in it doesn't tell me i don't i'm not interested in knowing what how strictly write up but it doesn't tell me that information anywhere and i can tell where you're dropping it and so people that are nuking things that i think think it's plausible that they've been to that city and that's exactly the point why it's meant to be so that you blow it up and you say oh yeah i've walked that distance before i know how long how much destruction that would be there in this house and not supermarket or what have you then there's what i call cathartic which is people nuke in places it's unlikely they ban so people in different countries will nuke certain other countries where i think the odds that they're nuking the place they've actually been before is very low so people in america sometimes what will new people in yangon north korea very few americans have been the north korea or tehran iran right and so are those the big ones that americans tend to nuke well americans are actually pretty equal opportunity the ok to places that we nuke more than anybody else we need everybody to make sure the only two places that we know more than anybody else are hiroshima nagasaki because we recreate the the world war two new games but everywhere else where we don't really know anyone place is the distinctly that high that's different than some countries so you know the russians like t americans that's their number two who they nuke over time and who's the number one for the russians themselves most countries who come selves the ok so called correct way of using it most people there are a few countries that don't but almost everybody nukes themself most of the great differs and the number two is america and the number three they spread out among other places ok so you can look at this sort of thing so how many people are using it just for fun no doubt some large number but fortunately if you know if only half of that large number are doing it for learning the very large number of learning to place right that's still a very large percentage and i do try to make things a matter that make it hard to just laugh about it so there's a bump in the merits not extremely prominent but when they're called humanitarian impact yeah and it will tell you how many schools and how many churches and how many hospitals and fire departments are structured and this is again the schools is a is a variable that people don't like to think about historically there's an interesting side note schools were very useful for determining the fate how the rates of the hiroshima nagasaki bombs because they're one of the few social institutions that will tell you how many people were supposed to be there on that day and then you can compare with how many people are still around and so they have all of these very gristly graphs showing all of the different elementary schools and how they correspond with the fatality rates for the bombs so schools are going to be part of any kind of destruction in the city and you tell that to people and then there they caught they they don't laugh quite as hard if it's not movement today in the light of nuclear secrecy and also just in light of apathy or what ways would you have or suggest to frame the message so that people can actually get their heads around this topic y where usually talk about questions of disarmament is to change the question a little bit and this is a one of my main issues is that in the world today people have very quick answers to any question they have sort of the jerk response some of programmed into them and we don't always know who the source of the programming are could be schools could be friends it could be you know different books they've read but whenever somebody has a just a quick response i try to find a way to short circuit that and make them rethink it over and so my question is usually not should we get rid of nuclear weapons but what's the minimum number of nuclear weapons to make everybody feel safe and that becomes a very different answer for some people it's going to be zero they're going to say i'll feel safer if there are none some people will say well maybe it was about one hundred right then the odds of accidentally using them or you would be tempted to use all your weapons at once you can't kill everybody but maybe they would still act as a deterrent we don't trust russia we don't try and china north korea things like that for some people it's going to be a couple o thousand some of the current u s official responses it's about five thousand makes us feel safe but that's because the russians also have about five thousand going to lower that number in the united kingdom it's about two hundred and fifty and china it's about two hundred and fifty so each even countries will give you different responses to this but i like it because it focuses on the practical issues my problem with a lot of thinking on nuclear weapons in general for all political standpoint is we treat them mythologically we treat them as prox armageddon we treat them as the end of the world in the generic sense you can't avoid it you can't control it if they go off we all die and the truth is and the new cap is partially meant to emphasize this if a weapon of some size goes off the whole world doesn't but it's really terrible it's a terrible of the type of thing that you want to avoid you want to work very hard to avoid it but if a couple of weapons go off in you have climate change implications even if you get a couple one hundred go off you can lower the overall temperature by a few degrees have bad crops is bad and that will make the whole humans be she's extinct probably not we're really pretty rugged creatures we've lived through a lot ice ages and things like that is that something you would want to avoid incredibly yes no question about it but making it kind of more mundane and taking it out of the realm of everything flashes white and thus the world is a wasteland when people think of nuclear war as everything flash is white and it becomes a wasteland if you stop thinking about it in real terms you start thinking about as something that could really happen and starts to fall into you know most biblical mythological proportions if you think about it something that happens and this is a mundane human technology that we built with our hands and we built with you know we took rocks out of the ground and fashioned them into these things and it's now become something you can say well i don't know maybe we only need a one hundred of these things can get down to that level and then try to push for zero it becomes things that like the just other people running the system and it's a bunch of wires and a bunch of metal we have control over this human beings made these they can make these we can make the decisions about them we don't have to feel like this is in some realm of fatalism that we don't have any impact do you think it should go for emotions such as fear or go for more of the economic standpoint or from a historical basis what do you think would be the most effective argument for framing now you know it's tricky one of the sort of historical lessons about fear is that it gets out of your hands very quickly and so they've been the disarmament the past try to use fear very heavily and fear can backfire on you right if if i tell you  where weapons are terrible and you should fear them and if somebody use them would be the end the world maybe that will lead you to think we should get rid of them maybe it will lead you to be so afraid of them that you'll think we need a lot of them because it's the only way we're going to keep russia or iran or north korea from using  what does work what does work and in terms of the disarmament what i want people to do is to be able to think about the parameters of it i want them to be able to have a sort of level headed discussion  where you can say look would it be the end of the world if this happened you know would it be awful yes there's a pamphlet i like to show my students because it deserves a great weekend let's you know enjoyable to get it really gets them right in the gut and it's a pamphlet the government made in one thousand and fifty six and it's made for practitioners of the mortuary and history and so it's it's about people who bury bodies it says it's a very practical minded thing for what do you do with all the bodies after a nuclear war and it has these lines and it really just hit home of this is not something you can fantasize about doing and that are really practical so one of the things points out if you want to identify ten thousand corpses and you laid them out that's five and a more than if it's all about fear people get fatalistic they say i don't have any control over this but if it's about things specific situations you want to avoid and people start feeling like they're in control and they can do something so on that note of practicality we thank you so much for having joined us and sharing your insights with us thank you so much and we highly encourage you to go to his wonderful website which you will see listed below thank you so much