Chuck Hansen, the well known researcher into the history of nuclear weapons in the United States, died 26 March 2003 at the VA hospital in Palo Alto, California. He had been ill with brain cancer for two years. Over the last 30 years Chuck amassed perhaps the largest, and certainly the most revealing, collection of declassified U.S. government documents in private hands regarding U.S. nuclear weapons. Chuck published the first generally available description of the nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal in a small aeromodelling journal called Replica In Scale in 1976, reprints of which were distributed for years by the U.S. Government's own National Atomic Museum. In the pivotal legal case involving The Progressive magazine and journalist Howard Morland, in which the U.S. succeeded for six months in enforcing the longest prior restraint against publication in U.S. history, it was the publication in the Madison Press-Connection of Chuck's letter to a U.S. senator analyzing the government's case that led to the collapse of the government case. Before that date the U.S. government vigorously prosecuted any almost any discussion of nuclear weapon principles. This policy was abandoned after the publication of Chuck's letter. In 1988 Chuck published his landmark "U.S. Nuclear Weapons", the first truly informative history of the post-war development of nuclear weapons in the United States. In 1995 he published on CD-ROM his expanded The Swords of Armageddon: U.S. Nuclear Weapons Development since 1945. Chuck has been a major asset to researchers in this subject, providing materials to Pulitizer Prize winning author Richard Rhodes, among many others. He provided valuable materials to the defense team of Wen Ho Lee, during the famous recent security case at Los Alamos. Carey Sublette, 26 March 2003 |
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Chuck Hansen |
The contribution of Chuck Hansen to American society cannot be appreciated without considering the environment in which his work took place.
Since 1945 the nature of war and thus global politics has been fundamentally altered by the creation of nuclear weapons. Such extraordinary destructiveness packaged in a single bomb forever altered the balance between offense and defense in war, giving a permanent ascendancy to the former. But the first nuclear weapons, as powerful as they were, were heavy, limited devices. Scientists and could conceive of devices that were far more powerful than the first city-shattering bomb, and ways they could be produced and delivered in great numbers. The fate of world history depended on which nation could produce the most powerful and the most numerous weapons, and the means to deliver them. "Windows of vulnerability" appeared, at least in men's imaginations, where to lag the opponent nation's capabilities by mere months might a continent-wide holocaust and national extinction. The result was the Arms Race, a thirty-year marathon of nuclear weapons development and testing, and of the creation of vast, highly secret, and enormously expensive industrial and military empires.
The story of the Arms Race cannot be understood without knowing what took place inside those empires. Knowing this secret history is critically important to understanding what happened in the world in those years, and why. Western democracy is founded on the principle that open exchange of information and public debate is essential for maintaining a healthy and successful society, and is moreover the means by which the individual exercises control of his or her own destiny. As Senator Daniel Moynihan, who fatefully passed away on the same day as Chuck, observed about the U.S. victory in the Cold War: "It was a victory achieved by openness, not secrecy". Without knowing the inner history of the Arms Race, public debate cannot profit from it.
When Chuck Hansen began his work in researching and writing about nuclear affairs in the 1970s many of the most basic facts about nuclear weapons, their development, and the U.S. nuclear arsenal were unknown to the public. Without knowing the facts, it was impossible to judge the truth or falsity of the claims of politicians, generals, and pressure groups. Were there 'windows of vulnerability'? 'Bomber gaps'? 'Missile gaps'? Were claims of 'endangerment of national security' true or false? What were the risks of other nations acquiring their own nuclear weapons? Without knowledge of how the U.S. had acquired its own weapons, it was impossible to judge.
During World War II, intense secrecy had not only surrounded the Manhattan Project itself it had also been extended into the public arena, where any discussion of the possibility of atomic power or weapons was suppressed. This policy was continued long after the end of the war and was still in force when Chuck began publishing. At that time speculation by private individuals, using only public information, could and did lead to visits from the FBI, or legal action by the U.S. government.
Using only public and properly declassified information Chuck published the first publicly available description of the weapon in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. When the landmark legal case U.S. vs The Progressive led to the longest prior restraint on publication in U.S. history, in 1979, it was Chuck Hansen's letter to a U.S. Senator analyzing the government's allegations that led to the collapse of the government's case. This event marked the end to the policy of atomic information being "born secret" and opened public debate on the nature and implications of nuclear weapons. This legacy remains with us today, even in the increasingly secretive world of post 9-11 America.
Chuck Hansen's 1988 book U.S. Nuclear Weapons: the Secret History provided the first comprehensive view of how nuclear weapons development continued in the United States after the end of the Manhattan Project. With the publication of this book many misconceptions that had stood for decades were put to rest. Even with Chuck's massive follow up work, The Swords of Armageddon published on CD-ROM in 1995, U.S. Nuclear Weapons remains the standard work on this subject.
It is impossible to overemphasize the critical role that "U.S. Nuclear Weapons" and "The Swords of Armageddon" have played in the public discussion of nuclear weapons and the history of the Arms Race over the last 15 years. These two works are the principal source of information that informs this debate. All of works of technical and historical analysis on nuclear weapons since have relied on them, and the archival work that went into preparing them. My own work in preparing an accessible guide to nuclear weapons to inform public debate would have been impossible without them.
Chuck's last major contribution to public affairs occurred during the Wen Ho Lee case, when his archive of declassified publications allowed the defense team to expose false representations in the case being prepared against the Los Alamos nuclear scientist. In the end, all claims of espionage against Wen Ho Lee were dropped.
Knowledge is power. A monopoly on knowledge, even though it be held in the name of the People, distorts and corrupts. Chuck Hansen played an historic role in opening up the secret history of the Cold War to public scrutiny, and thus passed the power to decide public policy back to the People to whom it always belonged by right.
Carey Sublette, 27 March 2003
By Dan Stober
San Jose Mercury News, Tue, April 1, 2003
Chuck Hansen was America's premier private collector of nuclear weapons secrets. It was a niche position -- there was no one else quite like him -- that he earned through 30 years of relentlessly requesting declassified documents from the archives of the military, the Energy Department and nuclear weapons laboratories.
He toiled alone in his cluttered Sunnyvale home stacked with files and books, wielding the Freedom of Information Act like a sword. Working in the late hours of the night, he correlated tidbits of information from tens of thousands of obscure memos and reports, ultimately creating a book and later a CD that are the ultimate unclassified catalog and technical history of U.S. nuclear weapons.
His work was known throughout the nuclear world, from Beijing to Washington, a reference for historians, novelists and the bomb designers at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories.
Mr. Hansen, 55, died Wednesday of brain cancer, having made scant financial profit from his labor of love. Ironically, copies of his out-of-print 1988 book, "U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History," were selling on eBay this week for $975 each.
But he took satisfaction in knowing that his work was appreciated by the nuclear cognoscenti. Novelist Tom Clancy, who plumbed Mr. Hansen's work for his nuclear thriller, "The Sum of All Fears," once said the data was "a little too good."
"He pursued every scrap of government paper, every document, that he could prize out of the vast and difficult security apparatus," said Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. "He would even get various declassified versions of a document to see if a word blacked out here was not blacked out there."
At a conference of government officials in 1994, a speaker listed several categories of people seeking declassification of nuclear documents. The last category was simply, "Chuck Hansen."
He was born in Salina, Kansas, but grew up in Seattle. As a child he was fascinated by the airplanes taking off from the Boeing airfield. He later worked for Boeing and attended the University of Washington before coming to what is now Silicon Valley in 1968 to work in software.
He met his wife, Eleanor, in the Greyhound Bus station in San Francisco the next year as they were each returning from Thanksgiving trips.
He began gathering weapons documents in the early 1970s. "He was an obsessive collector, to an unnatural extent," Eleanor Hansen said last week, smiling as she was surrounded by the floor-to-ceiling bookcases and piles of papers in her husband's home office.
He first described individual weapons in the U.S. nuclear stockpile in the mid-1970s in an article in a magazine for model-airplane hobbyists.
Another obsessed young writer named Howard Morland used it as one of his sources for a 1979 article in Progressive magazine about the secrets of the hydrogen bomb. The article became national news when the Carter administration went to court in an unsuccessful attempt to block its publication. Mr. Hansen jumped into the fray, sponsoring a "National Collegiate H-bomb Design Contest" to prove there were no true secrets.
Unlike Morland, Mr. Hansen was not a campaigner against nuclear weapons. Mr. Hansen was "fascinated by the bomb," Morland said this week. "He was also clearly against the government and trying to help us any way he could."
His social skills were unpolished, but he was generous in sharing his data. "I just think that historians will be relying on Swords of Armageddon for years and years to come," said Harvard University historian Priscilla McMillan, referring to Mr. Hansen's CD. "Think of the work he did getting this information and making it available to so many people, with no credit gained."
For a change of pace, Chuck and Eleanor, a tax accountant, kept dozens of pigeons in their back yard, many of them brought there by the Wildlife Rescue Center. "So I'm not alone now," she said.
Mr. Hansen's trove of documents will go to the National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. "I'm losing a husband and the nation is gaining an archive," Eleanor Hansen said.
CHUCK HANSEN
Born: May 13, 1947, in Salina, Kansas. Died: March 26, 2003, in Palo Alto Survived by: His wife, Eleanor Hansen of Sunnyvale; two sisters, Karen Hansen of Lakeland, Fla., and Laura Hansen of Winter Haven, Fla.
by Steven Aftergood, the Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy News, April 1, 2003
Chuck Hansen, a pioneering researcher into the technical history of nuclear weapons whose creative exploitation of the Freedom of Information Act helped open up an ocean of previously classified historical records, died last week.
His documentary spadework quietly nurtured the burgeoning field of nuclear history. References to his work are commonplace in footnotes to scholarly publications in the field and his name, as often as not, can also be found in the authors' acknowledgments.
Mr. Hansen's 1988 book U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History came as a lightning bolt that illuminated an entire landscape of technological endeavor, and quickly became a collector's item. A document collection titled Swords of Armageddon followed in 1995 on CD-ROM.
Mr. Hansen was not noticeably troubled by the question of the role of declassified technical data, if any, in facilitating nuclear weapons proliferation. That, he seemed to feel, was somebody else's problem. The same perspective is apparently shared by one online bookseller in New York who is offering a copy of his U.S. Nuclear Weapons for $595.00 with the blurb "Buy it before Osama does!!"
There are lots of neat "Chuck Hansen stories" that deserve a place in the social history of the Freedom of Information Act, if such a thing is ever written.
In one remarkable episode, an FOIA request from Hansen prompted an FBI investigation because, the government wrongly believed, there was no legitimate way that he could have known about the specific document that he was requesting. See: "File an FOIA Request and Meet the FBI" in Secrecy and Government Bulletin, Feb/Mar 1994: