Q: Are you saying Joseph Smith had nuclear weapons?
A: We are saying something more specific. We are saying the evidence is consistent with custody, not construction.
We are not claiming that Joseph Smith built a nuclear device. The committee’s working position is more careful than that.
What we are claiming is that the evidence is consistent with Smith having custody of a small number of objects, between 1827 and his death in 1844, that:
- Were not of his manufacture.
- Were in some way energetic — described in the documentary record using language that is otherwise metaphorical but that, in a small number of specific passages, is technically consistent with the behaviour of a contained fission event.
- Were regarded as sacred by Smith and by a small circle of his inner associates, and moved, hidden, and protected accordingly.
- Have never been publicly accounted for, by the Church or by any state actor, since his death.
Whether the objects were actually energetic in the modern physics sense — i.e. whether they constituted what we would today call a nuclear device — is a separate question, and one we are not in a position to answer. The committee’s position is that the question deserves a serious, public, and unredacted investigation, and that no such investigation has ever been conducted.