Nuclear security

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

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.