Restricted Data
The first full history of US nuclear secrecy, from its origins in the late 1930s to our post–Cold War present. The American atomic bomb was born in secrecy. From the moment scientists first conceived of its possibility to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and beyond, there were efforts to control the spread of nuclear information and the newly discovered scientific facts that made such powerful weapons possible. The totalizing scientific secrecy that the atomic bomb appeared to demand was new, unusual, and very nearly unprecedented. It was foreign to American science and American democracy—and potentially incompatible with both. From the beginning, this secrecy was controversial, and it was always contested. The atomic bomb was not merely the application of science to war, but the result of decades of investment in scientific education, infrastructure, and global collaboration. If secrecy became the norm, how would science survive? Drawing on troves of declassified files, including records released by the government for the first time through the author’s efforts, Restricted Data traces the complex evolution of the US nuclear secrecy regime from the first whisper of the atomic bomb through the mounting tensions of the Cold War and into the early twenty-first century. A compelling history of powerful ideas at war, it tells a story that feels distinctly American: rich, sprawling, and built on the conflict between high-minded idealism and ugly, fearful power.
Stats for nerds
5recommend
13mentions
12people
2017–2026years
46% recommend54% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- >There will inevitably be some people who dismiss this story as a dishonest marketing trick by OpenAI to make their models sound terrifyingly effective. I found 81 instances of the term “marketing” in the Hacker News discussion of the incident.
Of course it is a dishonest marketing trick, OpenAI can't function any other way, but for another reason. Forget about effectiveness! This capability is known since Mythos and was completely believable before it. The trick is in propagandizing self-sufficient malicious rogue AI as the only possible course of events, and the necessity of banning everyone except themselves from AI R&D. It did NOT decide to hack HF spontaneously on its way to make more paperclips, people were guiding it specifically to hack computer systems so it's been in that particular mode. I'm amazed I even need to point out this fact and the giant conflict of interests they have.
They like to compare it with an atomic bomb, which is another trick. The secrecy around the atomic bomb had a massive pushback by the brightest minds who designed it, in the US, USSR (where it was much harder), and also any other countries that had to do this. And that is in the post-war setting, with Hiroshima and Nagasaki being direct examples of what even a small and primitive bomb can do. Declassification was the only thing that allowed to develop industrial-scale nuclear power and do a huge number of other innovations.
I advise taking a pause to cool down from all the AI hype and read Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States by Alex Wellerstein, to understand the atmosphere in the US scientific community at the time (it was similar in the USSR, which industrial history I studied, although less rigorously than Alex), and reflect on how it compares with those people in modern AI labs and even outside them, in the self-appointed AI safety community.
- See also "Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States" by Alex Wellerstein.
- For those interested, Restricted Data is a fascinating book in this vein.
- C&C is excellent. Restricted Data by Alex Wellerstein is a fascinating history of nuclear secrecy. Also known as the NUKEMAP guy.
The Dead Hand by David Hoffman is also amazing and covers chemical and bio weapons as well. It has a good bit on the struggle to contain all of the chem/bio/nuke weapons when the USSR was falling apart.
- "Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States", on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/022602038X
- The article mentions Alex Wellerstein, who I cannot recommend highly enough for anyone interested in nuclear weapons. He runs the Restricted Data blog,[1] which is excellent and well worth the hours of reading you can spend there. He's probably most famous for NUKEMAP.[2]
1: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/
2: http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
Two of his more recent pieces, are particularly worthwhile:
Brief history of the nuclear triad: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/07/15/brief-history-nucl...
The President and the bomb: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/11/18/the-president-and-...
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