ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Architecture of Secrecy

• In Event: Laboratories of Concealment: New Perspectives on Postwar Science, Secrecy and the State

English Abstract

Physical spaces play key roles in the creation of secrecy regimes, serving multiple functions, including the physical demarcation of spaces "inside" and "outside" of particular secrecy regimes, obscuring the activities going on within those spaces, and reinforcing the rhetoric of secrecy being imposed. In this paper I will survey several different "architectures of secrecy," with a particular focus on scientific and technical facilities involved in the research and production of nuclear weapons, in several countries. Particular attention will be given to the ways in which technical and rhetorical affordances have shaped the architectural choices involved.

Author

• Alex Wellerstein, Stevens Institute of Technology