Historian Alex Wellerstein

Historical Society News:

The Los Alamos Historical Society’s November lecture was temporarily sold out, but more spots have now been added for the free virtual event.

Alex Wellerstein will present “The ‘Best-Kept Secret of the War’? The Successes and Failures of Manhattan Project Secrecy”, 6 p.m., Nov. 17.

Visit www.losalamoshistory.org/events to register.

How successful was the Manhattan Project at keeping the atomic bomb a secret—and what were the Project’s goals for secrecy in the first place? In this talk, the Manhattan Project’s security regime will be deconstructed and analyzed as to its multiple goals (which included far more than simply keeping information about the project from the Germans, Japanese, or Soviet Union), and why it was “successful” at achieving some of these goals but utterly failed at others.

Ultimately this approach realigns our understanding of what secrecy regimes are, how they work (and why they sometimes don’t), and the key differences between the secrecy of World War II and the Cold War that followed.

Wellerstein is a historian of nuclear weapons, and his first book, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States is being published by the University of Chicago Press in early 2021. He is an assistant professor and the Director of Science and Technology Studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hoboken, New Jersey. He received his PhD in History of Science from Harvard University in 2010.

The Los Alamos Historical Society lecture series is made possible by the generous sponsorship of Enterprise Bank & Trust, Member FDIC; the National Endowment for the Humanities; the New Mexico Humanities Council; and Robin and Richard McLean.

The Los Alamos Historical Society preserves, promotes, and communicates the remarkable history and inspiring stories of Los Alamos and its people for our community, for the global audience, and for future generations.

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