Alex Wellerstein

Adjunct Lecturer, Department of History
Age: 32
Hometown: Stockton, Calif.
Education: B.A. University of California, Berkeley, History; Ph.D. Harvard University, History of Science
Area of research: History of nuclear weapons and nuclear secrecy
Time at Georgetown: One semester
Courses Taught: “Science and the Cold War”

Since you’ve been here for less than a full semester, what is your perception thus far of Georgetown’s campus culture?
Every university — I’ve taught at a bunch of universities and of course was a student at one as well — has its own undergraduate culture and ethos. When I was at Berkeley as an undergraduate — a really big school and a big public school — there were such a wide range of people there and who are there for all sorts of different reasons. … Obviously, Harvard is totally different from that. … Harvard seemed more about networking, and a lot of them want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, or at least the guy who’s funding Mark Zuckerberg. And Georgetown has a very different feel. And maybe this is incorrect, but the students here seem really interested in public service and policy and making changes in the world. Georgetown is more focused on that, and there are always going to be exceptions, but I don’t get the feeling that people here are trying to figure out how they are going to make money. I don’t get the feeling that everyone here is obsessed with whether they’re smarter or not smarter than everyone around them. It feels focused on this question, of “How am I going to change the world in a concrete fashion, not a generic fashion?”

What’s the greatest challenge in your field today?
Most of what I teach is the history of science, which most people don’t even know about, but my specific work is on nuclear weapons. The biggest challenge in anything about nuclear weapons is like anything with Cold War science, that no undergraduate was there during the Cold War. Making that real and getting them to take the concerns of people who lived then seriously [is challenging]. Nobody here has ever been alive when there was a Soviet Union, there’s no such thing anymore. But all these things are still super relevant. Making that past feel relevant is the fun challenge. My experience is that undergraduates, not just here but everywhere, have almost zero knowledge of what a nuclear weapon is, how they use them and what they use them for. … My goal is to make the history relevant and show that you can care about it for its own sake, you can care about it for moving forward, and that it’s important to know it.

What do you think is the most fascinating question in your field?
The real paradox is how you have all the secrecy, all this danger, all this risk, all this expense co-existing with this democracy that in the Constitution has these explicit, strong protections on speech and these strong prohibitions of strict military rule. It was actually really boring in the Soviet Union, because they were a big military state and their government could do whatever it wanted, but you can’t do that in the United States. You have to sell the people on these ideas, even that you can’t tell them about how the world is set up and how you’ve tried to help them or how dangerous things are. So, for me, that’s at the center of my work and that’s what makes the United States interesting to study relative to the nuclear question. Because we still have this today, where people aren’t sure what they think about nuclear weapons or secrecy, whether nuclear or otherwise. It actually matters what Americans think of this. And we have a society that has this very deep commitment in our foundational documents and expectations to government to transparency, which is completely antithetical to having a large nuclear weapons arsenal that you’re going to use secrecy to control other people. And that’s what makes it fun to study — what will the press do, how much can they get away with?

What led you to concentrate in your field?
I started getting into history of science as an undergrad, it was practically accidental and I was working in the department doing computer stuff. … I already really liked history — it felt powerful to me. I felt like if you knew how things worked, you could see that the way the world is today doesn’t have to be that way — there were choices made. History of science I like because I’m really into science, but I’m terrible at science. … History of science lets you do all the cool things in science, and you also get to think about deep philosophical questions like “What is a fact?” “How is knowledge made?” “How do two facts that are contradictory play out, when there are different groups of people [on each side]?” These are questions that resonate on a philosophical level, but also on a practical level. … As for nuclear things, [I learned that] the University of California used to manage all the nuclear weapons labs, they don’t anymore, and I just thought that was such an interesting contradiction. A place like Berkeley, which is famous for activists and left-wings and Communists, partially justified, is also one of the birth places of the atomic bomb and managed laboratories all the way into the 2000s. … The guy smoking pot with the incense and the lava lamps has [a picture of] the discoverer of the thing that killed 100,000 people in Japan over his head, and he doesn’t even know it. … There’s so much fun stuff in the secrets that you’re not really supposed to know. 

What is the most interesting nuclear secret you’ve discovered?
The most shocking that I’ve discovered, which nobody knows about unless they read my blog — nuclearsecrecy.com — in the mid-1950s, there were scientists in the United States, working for the government, that were seriously pushing the development of a weapon that was about the size of a doomsday device. So, the biggest bomb that the United States ever detonated was 15 megatons. … That’s a thousand times bigger than the Hiroshima bomb. And the Soviets made a bomb that was 60 megatons in the ’60s. So that’s already a ridiculously large bomb. And this [10,000 megaton bomb] was real, the scientists briefed Congress on it … and called it the Sundial. They estimated that at the time, that it was a big enough bomb to make the Earth permanently radioactive and not inhabitable for human life. It was such a big bomb that even the Air Force eventually decided that it was ridiculous and stupid and they would never want to use such a thing. … it’s barely mentioned in anything unclassified, you have to read between the lines and follow the code names. This is one of the things that I’ve found.

What is the greatest challenge in teaching?
With a student who’s really interested in a topic, there’s no challenge. … but I was an undergraduate, I was a terrible procrastinator. I want to keep students from doing some of the mistakes I did, because if I had actually read everything that was assigned to me and paid attention in every lecture, I’d be so smart! … [you want to target the] students in the middle, the one who would be interested if you present the material in the right way. 

What would be your ideal course to teach?
Oh, the one I’m teaching is pretty good. I really enjoy teaching people about the history of nuclear weapons because it’s what I have been thinking about for the last 10 years, and it’s what I do every day, even on the weekends. And it’s not because I have to or I feel this big burden, but because I find it really interesting and fun. Any class that lets me channel that enthusiasm is going to be way better for the students, because someone can tell if you like something or you don’t, but it’s an opportunity for me to pull out all the stops and [teach] in a way you can’t get from a book. 

What do you think you would be doing if you weren’t in academia?
Oh, probably begging for change. No, well I also have a lot of computer skills and have been working in computer development longer than I’ve been studying history — it’s one of those things I taught myself because I didn’t have enough friends, back in the ’80s when the Cold War still existed — and so I do a lot of things online, the blogging, and I also built a nuclear weapons simulator called the Nuke Map. About 6 million people have used it since I put it online two years ago. So, I would probably be doing something like that for a nonprofit or a think tank or something like that where having somebody who is essentially a humanist but knows how to interact with technical people, and take fairly complex technical issues and present them in a way that other people who are not technical wizards can understand. So, that’s been a lot of my goal, to show people that real science is hard, but you can understand a lot of it if it is presented in the right way. … It matters how you vote, and I want you to be informed about these issues. 

Interview by Sheena Karkal