That Time a Scientist Left Plans for the Hydrogen Bomb in a Train Bathroom (2024)

• A historian is shining light on the loss of hydrogen bomb secrets on a train in 1953.
• The political report intended to sway public opinion toward the hydrogen bomb in a time when people were skeptical and afraid.
• Hydrogen bombs are at least 1,000 times stronger than the atomic bombs used in Japan in 1945.

In 1953, American physicist John Wheeler lost the document detailing the hydrogen bomb, just a couple of months after the first successful test in the far-outlying Marshall Islands. Wheeler left the plans in a train’s bathroom and they were never seen again. Whoops.

The program bounced back, testing another hydrogen bomb in 1954 in the Bikini Atoll. Historian Alex Hellerstein studies nuclear history and how it’s declassified over time, and he wrote about the missing document for Physics Today.

There’s no evidence that the missing hydrogen bomb document ever found its way into enemy hands—just lost and likely tossed in the trash by a train employee. Wheeler’s insistence on packing the pages in two nested envelopes probably made it even harder to figure out who the contents belonged to on the train. Imagine being the service worker who finds discarded papers in a toilet stall, and instead of a newspaper or magazine, it’s your nation’s cutting-edge nuclear secrets.

Back in 1953, the hydrogen bomb was gigantic news. The United States sought a next step after the Soviets caught up on the “regular” atomic bomb in 1949, but okaying development of a hydrogen bomb represented a drastic step toward the dark side. A hydrogen bomb is 1,000 times more powerful than an atomic bomb, with potential to be daisy-chained into something even bigger. Instead of losing the scientific equivalent of his house keys, Wheeler had lost the keys to all his extended family's homes and all the local banks.

Wellerstein explains that the hydrogen bomb was inherently political from its inception because of the symbolism of moving so much further past the atomic bomb; public and political opinion of nuclear weapons had polarized very fast after these weapons were used to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki, kill their inhabitants, and poison the surrounding area for decades. The document Wheeler lost on the train was a political one, a report designed to sway opinion on the hydrogen bomb.

Scientists like Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi were against the bomb, but were in turn opposed by the National Security Council, which formed in 1947 with a clear agenda to take on the Cold War with hawkish determination. The document Wheeler carried was a would-be proof of concept to address Oppenheimer and others’ concerns that trying to develop a hydrogen bomb was a pie-in-the-sky waste of time.

The hydrogen bomb that was tested in 1952 required a special and gigantic 80-ton cryogenic chamber to keep the materials in the bomb in their necessary state. It was only feasible in the most cursory sense of the word, unable to be transported at all, let alone on an airplane or military ship. But simply having a successful chemical reaction on the scale the designers promised gave them a way into further negotiations about development.

There’s beautiful symbolism in the idea that secrets of the most deadly weapon on Earth were misplaced by a man using a public restroom. Today, our scares over hydrogen weapons are relegated mostly to North Korea’s blustering in the media, but Russia still has the record for the largest bomb ever tested on Earth. Wheeler’s lost secrets never made it into enemy hands, and the enemy didn’t even need them—but the panic over their loss was very, very real.