theorywatch

Today a thread in the Competitive Intelligence class discussion forum on CI and intellectual property that Ethan’s running mentioned Harvard History of Science doctoral student Alex Wellerstein’s research on patenting the atomic bomb. (Thanks, Mike and Ethan!) While that in itself is interesting enough, Wellerstein’s website mentions a paper he’s written that I find even more intriguing: Diagrams of destruction: Secrecy, style, and the drawing of nuclear weapons:

“Ever since their dramatic and very public debut, nuclear weapons have been symbols of military and political power, and part of this power has been reinforced by the alleged secrecy of their methods of production, their individual mechanisms, and their designs. But the few “official” depictions of their internal workings, the “physics package” which arranges their fission and fusion reactions, have been tight-lipped, relegating the majority of all image-making to the private sector, outside the circle of “classification.” Attempts to graphically depict the internal mechanisms of nuclear weapons have been fraught with epistemological anxiety, with no possibility of recourse to “the thing itself,” and yet held forth the promise of understanding “secret” and forbidden knowledge. No other technical artifact has had quite this amount of power and uncertainty in the same space. This paper explores the history of diagrams of nuclear weapons as a lens through which to understand the unique epistemological problems created by classification and secrecy, and the intersections of power and knowledge in visual representation and visual tropes that occur with such literally and figuratively explosive subject matter, with the hope of shedding light on how those of us “outside the fence” of classification interact with forbidden knowledge.”

Now, there’s someone who’s going to have what I’d call a powerful research agenda!