CHUCK HANSEN, NUCLEAR HISTORIAN
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:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/bulletin/sec32.html#4
An obituary, "C. Hansen, collected nuclear arms
data" by Dan
Stober, appeared in the San Jose Mercury News, April 1:
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/5530953.htm
I was just reading in "Surely your joking Mr
Feynman!"..."...So I look back up and I see this white light
changing into yellow then into orange.Clouds form and disappear again -
from the compression and expansion of the shock wave."
AND
"...Finally after about a minute and a half,theres suddenly a
tremendous noise - BANG,and then a rumble,like thunder - and that's what
convinced me.Nobody had said a word during this whole
thing."
