Put Up Your Nukes

In Brief

The United States just can't keep its nuclear secrets secret. Congress and the Department of Energy seem to spend all their time in a he-said she-said shouting match while important stuff keeps getting lost or wanders out the door. To make matters worse, the scientists argue that they’re too restricted. The US has suffered already by being too nice and docile in matters military -- just ask former Secretary of State Henry Stimson, whose 1929 decision that spying was ungentlemanly contributed to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Oops!

Party On

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The News

6/25/2000 The first part of the year 2000 was marked by officials at Los Alamos losing plenty of secret documents. In one notorious case, a scientist had taken home top secret material on his laptop. In another, secret files were 'lost' behind a copier machine.

The Department of Energy gets the Alfred E. Neuman National Security Incompetency Award for losing two hard drives containing nuclear secrets for weeks before finding them mysteriously placed behind a copy machine. There was boffo classified information on the drives covering topics like nuke defusing, Russian weapons capabilities, and more. Fantastic. To make matters worse, the drives had been missing a full three weeks before anyone bothered to report the loss. One would fully expect a responsible agency to cut some heads off at this point. We certainly would, and we like to think of ourselves as merciful.

The Department of Energy did not. Instead, it got in a he-started-it shoving match with Congress over why things haven't gotten better since the last enormous security breach. A full year has gone by since the big stink over the scientist who was caught downloading massive amounts of data and bringing it home, and back then everyone was justifiably up in arms. A big to-do ensued, but it didn't change anything - the lab is still losing materials for weeks at a time and officials are still scratching their heads about it. It's like they're running a bank that counts its money every other month, and everyone involved seems content to point fingers and watch more mistakes happen. After bitching loudly a year ago, Congress dragged its feet in creating a watchdog agency. For his part, Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson talked like he couldn't control his own people: "I'm attacked by scientists that say 'too much security,'" he whined. Whatever. Here at History House, we say, screw 'em. These are nuclear arms we're talking about! If there's one thing everyone should have learned by now, you can't be "nice" when it comes to matters that might involve wholesale destruction and war. Exhibit A: Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, under US President Coolidge in the 1920s.

Lending a Hand by Lending an Ear

In 1929, when Stimson found out the US had been eavesdropping on the British, French, Italian, and Japanese governments to prep itself for treaty negotiations, he was outraged. Imagine! he thought. Us pulling dirty tricks like that! I'll never allow it! He wrote in his diary that it was a "highly unethical thing" and that "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail." What a corkingly upright fellow.

As such, after being bitter and cranky about it, Stimson axed State Department funding to the eavesdropping/codebreaking project (dramatically named the "Black Chamber") and fired team leader Herbert Yardley. Stimson then promptly wrote a book detailing the incident, which heartily encouraged the Japanese to change all their codes and completely revise their military communications. This change included creating the infamous "Purple" code, which so stymied US intelligence that they had to reinstate the codebreaking project with the Army. The poor cryptologists were so bamboozled by the Purple code they spent 20 months on it. Once cracked, they figured no other, lesser Japanese code could possibly be worth their time.

USS Arizona sinking

Fat chance. The Japanese communicated with those lesser codes and showed up in Hawaii while the US had its pants down and bombed the hell out of Pearl Harbor. It's a good thing Secretary Stimson felt obliged to crow US dishonesty in print and get the Japanese to go ballistic on encryption, otherwise that sneak attack might have been anticipated. We credit US lawmakers with an equal amount of foresight. Too bad they've got these political squabbles to take care of first, rather than worrying about the possible eruption of rogue mushroom clouds.

 
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