Learning Secrecy in the Early Cold War: The RAND Corporation*

Abstract

In the decades after World War II, unprecedented secrecy developed in the United States; secrecy became a principal hallmark (along with growing surveillance) of the emerging national security state. A republic that had taken pride in its openness and transparency was in the process of becoming, if not the “garrison state” of dire predictions, a far less democratic republic, beginning to be dominated, in the words of historian Robert D. Schulzinger, by “the habits of automatic secrecy.”1 Much scholarship exists about the development of secrecy in the post-World War II national security state.2 Some of that literature reminds us that democracies require a certain amount of secrecy to protect national interests at home and abroad, to conduct foreign policy and diplomatic negotiations, and so that leaders can make decisions based on honest, open, and informed policy discussions.3 Others, however, sharply criticize the secrecy that, escalating during World War II, deepened in the late 1940s and 1950s, waxing and waning in the 1960s through 1980s, declining under Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, escalating again under the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The nuclear arms race created its own vast network of secrecy as almost everything connected to nuclear weapon design, production, deployment, cost, and use remained deeply hidden. Historians William Burr, Thomas S. Blanton, and Stephen I. Schwartz estimate the monetary costs attributable to U.S. nuclear secrecy as being at least 3.4 billion dollars, but they also argue that the intangible political costs may have been even more significant: “the nuclear secrecy system has had adverse implications for informed congressional and public debate over nuclear policy, constitutional guarantees, government accountability, and civilian control over the military.”4 Secrecy can also be seen in new agencies and bureaucracies, a broadening of covert policies, expanded espionage and domestic surveillance, and deepened public fears about conspiracies.5