# The Case of The Progressive: Stonewalling the American People **URL:** **By** Marshall E. Schwartz **Published:** August 1, 1979 --- “And so Morland’s article joined the Pentagon Papers as the only articles the government has ever restrained from being published for “national security” reasons.” It really isn’t very much of a secret at all. In fact, I probably learned most of it back in high school—in those post-Sputnik days when, along with hundreds of thousands of other bright young Americans, I was a devoted student of the theory, practice, and ritual of science and technology. But isn’t that just what author Howard Morland and the editors of _The Progressive_ were trying to tell us when they tried to publish “The H-Bomb Secret: How We Got It and Why We’re Telling It” earlier this year, and immediately found themselves prohibited from doing so by the actions of the government and Federal District Judge Robert W. Warren of Milwaukee? The theory behind making a decent-sized nuclear weapon is not especially complicated (although designing bombs in the megaton or multi-megaton range requires much complex mathematical computation). And so, _The Progressive_ asserts, if a reporter without a strong scientific background can discover this so-called “secret” from unclassified sources in three months, then clearly there is no “secret” involved at all. If this is true—and all the facts point this way—then why has the United States government (and all other governments which have developed nuclear weapons) erected a labyrinth of bureaucratic entanglement around the nuclear power and weapons industries and then shrouded it in a cloak of mystery and awe? Yes, their purpose _is_ to hide a vital secret, but _not_ the “secret” they claim to protect. Rather than hiding the key technological clue that would permit other states—or, a more pertinent fear, various terrorist groups—to build their own superbombs, the government is trying to suppress the truth about the danger, lack of security and costs of the nuclear industry, and how that industry owes its very existence to blatant grants of special privilege by the state. This message—and not the formula that would permit a Qadaffi, an Amin, the Black Septembrists, or the Baader-Meinhof Gang to develop the means of nuclear blackmail, if not actually to use such a capability—is the one the federal government wanted to keep from the public. But if the technological non-secret were revealed, the political one must surely follow. Thus, the Justice Department, in its legal action against _The Progressive_, did its best to convince Judge Warren that publication of Howard Morland’s article could be an irreversible step down the path to nuclear annihilation. The Wisconsin jurist was more than willing to concur with the government’s claims in the first test of the secrecy provisions of the 1954 Atomic Energy Act. He cited old examples such as shouting fire in a crowded theater (which Murray Rothbard has shown is a simple violation of property rights) or publishing information about troop movements and placements during wartime, and declared he had enough evidence that the article could cause “irreparable harm” to restrain its publication. “You can’t speak freely when you’re dead,” he added. And so Morland’s article joined the Pentagon Papers as the only articles the government has ever restrained from being published for “national security” reasons. But whatever the philosophical implications of the judge’s last statement, it was irrelevant to the issue: The government’s claim that Morland’s revelations would in any way increase the threat of nuclear holocaust was just another lie. And only a moderately technical explanation of how an H-bomb functions is needed to show how much a lie it really was. ## How an atom bomb works The core of your basic atom bomb consists of a mass of uranium-235, or plutonium-239, or a combination of these two fissile materials (a fissile substance is one that can sustain a fission reaction, without the input of additional energy, once one begins; the atoms of a fissionable, but not fissile, substance will continue to split apart only if outside energy is added). When these isotopes are compressed to a critical density (so that atoms are close enough to each other), a fission reaction begins. In rudimentary bombs, such as the one that devastated Hiroshima, special high explosives surrounded the core, and when set off, drove the fissile materials together, to achieve critical density. When the two “heavy” isotopes of hydrogen are compressed—deuterium (which has one extra neutron) and tritium (which has two extra neutrons in its nucleus)—the fantastic heat (hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius) will cause atoms of heavy hydrogen to fuse, creating helium, releasing high-speed neutrons, and causing a fusion reaction. When deuterium and tritium (bonded to some light element such as lithium) are added to the core, these high-speed neutrons can trigger many more fission reactions in the uranium and plutonium before the core flies apart. This added release of energy can increase a bomb’s yield from the tens to the hundreds of kilotons, and is known as the booster principle. By extending this same concept another step, superbombs—of the megaton class—can be built. If the original fissile material can act as a two-stage trigger for an even larger bomb—in effect, creating a chain-reaction of chain-reactions? So, in a superbomb, around a basic “boosted” core are arranged layers of lithium-6 deuteride (a grey powder which can be compressed into a ceramic-like material) and uranium-238. First, the trigger bomb releases low-energy neutrons to split the lithium isotope in the first layer into tritium, and creates enough heat for the tritium and deuterium to fuse. The high-energy neutrons released by fusion start and boost a fission reaction in the next layer, and so on for as many layers as the designer has seen fit to incorporate, up to the tens or hundreds of megatons.\* These principles are also basic to the functioning of any star, including our sun; that’s just how the sun gives off the light and heat which permit life to exist on this planet. To create a mini-sun, a superbomb, requires highly precise, complex mathematical calculations for the size and placement of these fission/fusion layers, in order to gain the maximum release of energy in the few billionths of a second between the time fusion temperatures are reached and the matter of the bomb is scattered to all points of the compass at a speed of 30,000 miles per second. Without incredible accuracy, the outer layers will contribute nothing to the explosion. This precision permits the construction of weapons that are perhaps two feet in diameter—three feet for the very large—and weigh a pound-and-a-half per kiloton of yield, compared to the 12-kiloton bomb of Hiroshima, which was ten feet long and weighed 9,000 pounds.429 This is the secret which can lead to the destruction of much or even all of the globe by terrorists or mad politicians? In large part, yes; but those mad politicians have had the secret for years—those statists who rule the Soviet Union, the United States, China, Britain, France, and India, and who have displayed their magnificent achievements to the world and bathed us all in the glow of their fallout. To be sure, there are more gadgets and refinements involved in the bombs the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. have poised in missile silos, in nuclear submarines, and in long-range bombers. But these additions aren’t all that secret, either: When Howard Morland was visiting a St. Petersburg, Florida, plant which produces neutron generators (always helpful to boost a reaction), along with high-energy explosives, an official told him that the neutron generator used in nuclear weapons and made at that plant was “a high-voltage vacuum tube containing small amounts of deuterium and tritium,” and added that a Colorado Springs firm made an “unclassified” version of the device for use in the oil industry. Morland discovered this “secret” without using any classified material. And the government’s clampdown on publication of his article quickly led him to discover the deeper secret: “I quickly concluded,” he wrote in _Newsweek_, “that the Big Secret was a political ploy of extraordinary longevity. The illusion of secrecy has been used for 30 years to shield nuclear-weapons production and deployment from public scrutiny and to prevent ordinary citizens from understanding fundamental facts about a public issue. The article I wrote states that conclusion and illustrates the point by telling the secret.” Morland’s conclusion is the only one that makes sense. \*Here, uranium-238 (which is only fissionable), rather than uranium-235 (which is fissile), can be used, because the high-energy neutrons released by fusion will sustain the reaction. The state’s claim of the power to suppress even an idea born in one man’s mind, if that idea has been ‘classified’ as secret, is Orwellian enough without considering the key fact that the ‘secret’ is really public to anyone with a moderate background in physics and math and the perseverance to search through enough scientific texts, treatises, and journals. A volunteer researcher, assisting the American Civil Liberties Union with _The Progressive_’s appeal of Judge Warren’s decision, has uncovered even stronger evidence of how openly available is such information. Dmitri Rotow found a 29-page document that had been declassified in error—‘Weapon Development During June 1956,’ describing work done by the University of California’s Livermore Radiation Laboratory—in the Los Alamos, New Mexico, Scientific Library. According to a report by United Press, the document gave detailed results from nuclear weapons tests for a month, and included numerous details of bomb construction. ‘There is even a description in here of how to fill the empty spaces of the bomb cannister with foam,’ Rotow said. The state-created myth of some arcane nuclear secret which we must keep from anyone who doesn’t already have it or risk a worldwide holocaust is just a new trick in the government’s bag of ruses to mask the eternal bloating of its bureaucracy and the issuance of major grants of state favor. It has kept the public from examining what lies behind the state’s sleight-of-hand tricks with both nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The first atomic bombs were developed, tested, and used under the secrecy imposed because of war. No aspect of the nuclear weapons question has ever been examined completely because the only source for much of the basic information is the government itself. As long as we believed that our very lives depended on keeping the ‘H-bomb secret’ hidden, no one could properly debate questions of health hazards, hijacking possibilities, danger of accident, and actual cost (including all hidden subsidies), because the data was provided by the group with the greatest vested interest in the growth of nuclear adventures (in both power and weapons). ## Nuclear power: the undebated issues The issue of cost may be hardest to resolve. Subsidies, monopolies, and tax advantages granted to the nuclear power industry have made it seem that government propaganda about nuclear energy being a “cheap” source of power is true; as outlined in the May LR (“Nuclear Power: A Foreword on Three Mile Island,” by Jeff Riggenbach), we are beginning to discover just how much doesn’t show up on our monthly electric bill but is paid through taxes and inflation. Without state subsidy, publicity, and duplicity, nuclear power would not be economically feasible. As for nuclear weapons, any attempt to make fiscal sense out of our expenditures on this product for the past three-and-a-half decades will run headlong into Pentagon secrecy and cost figures—like all defense-related expenses—that are more padding than substance. But potential health risks will eventually reach public attention—even after a quarter of a century—if the dangers reach fruition. Three Mile Island and numerous other incidents that received less shrieking publicity have made the initial impact on the American consciousness. Add to this the $10.5-million in damages granted in late May to the estate of the late Karen Silkwood, a laboratory technician who was contaminated by radiation, before her 1974 death in an automobile accident, while working for this country’s largest miner and processor of uranium, Kerr-McGee. The Silkwood case carries sinister overtones because Silkwood had campaigned against lax safety and security procedures at Kerr-McGee, and because her fatal accident may not have been so accidental, according to some charges (she was on her way to meet a _New York Times_ reporter when she died). But it’s not only the nuclear worker whose life and health has been damaged by government callousness, unsafe “safety” standards and “permissible radiation levels” that existed more for the sake of the AEC’s and the NRC’s public images than for the sake of the public safety. Senator Edward M. Kennedy has been using one of the most flagrant examples as high-quality political fertilizer in recent months. This case stems from the United States’ above-ground testing program in Nevada between 1951 and 1962. Down-wind from the site of 86 atmospheric tests, in southern Utah, the residents have noticed that their rate of death from cancer is alarmingly high (at least twice what they should expect) decades after the AEC told them there was no danger from the mushrooms that rose over the Nevada Proving Ground. “The record will show that for over 20 years, the Federal government placed the citizens of Utah at risk without their knowledge and without taking proper precautions,” Kennedy declares. (We will not belabor the point that there are no “proper precautions” effective enough to counterbalance being forced to take a risk you don’t want to take.) According to documents recently pried loose from the AEC, President Dwight Eisenhower himself told the commission to keep the public “confused about fission and fusion.” In the same vein, Commissioner Walter Libby declared in 1955 that “people have got to live with the facts of life, and part of the facts of life are fallout.” One Utah town, St. George, was inundated by 6,000 millirems of radiation from one 1953 test alone. Compare this figure with the acceptable safety standard of that day, 3,900 millirems over a thirteen-week period; or with today’s allowable maximum of 500 millirems a year; or with the 1200 millirems released at Three Mile Island, which led to the evacuation of women and children. The only advice offered the citizens of St. George was to “stay indoors.” Thus, it is not surprising that resident Elbert Pickett has had ten relatives die of cancer in the past decade. Growing public awareness has begun to undermine the artificial superstructure which supports the nuclear power industry—a cartel whose competition is squashed by the state, whose legal liabilities are severely limited by the state, and whose safety criteria are established and enforced by its supporters within the state bureaucracy. Enough information is available to indicate many deceptions and dangers. But the shield of silence around the nuclear weapons complex is stronger; assaults like that of Morland have created only the first chinks in the glowing armor. Continued, incessant probing is needed before we can answer a plethora of vital questions, such as: How do our underground nuclear tests relate to weapons development? What is the connection between test and bomb? If the link isn’t strong enough, then tests cannot be justified by any form of logic. Just how secure are our supplies of bombs and weapons-grade uranium and plutonium from hijacking by terrorists or, less likely, agents of antagonistic states? We realize that most of the “missing” nuclear fuel that the government grudgingly concedes is gone has found its way to Israel. But where is the rest? The building of a large bomb requires the most advanced technology available today, but a small bomb (perhaps two or three times the yield of the Hiroshima weapon) requires considerably less sophistication. FBI Director William H. Webster underscored this danger when, in early April, he told reporters that it is now possible to build a nuclear bomb small enough to strap on a person’s back based on information available in public libraries. The most important safeguard against such an eventuality, he added, was control of nuclear fuel. Webster was discussing terrorist capabilities when he made his remarks. How many bombs, and of what size, would be needed to wipe out a given target? Until experts not on a government payroll have the data to produce independent estimates of yield, radiation, and destructive power, no one can offer a tactical alternative to the Defense Department’s deployment in terms of either location, size, or number. If Pentagon policy decisions on nuclear armament at all resemble its actions in other areas, the United States undoubtedly has spent much more than it should have for many more nuclear weapons than it needs installed in places that have limited usefulness. An argument for weapons that are more reliable, accurate, or powerful will not support a claim for just more weapons. ## The right to know As Albert Einstein said in 1957, “There is no secret and there is no defense.” There is nothing to be gained by keeping most information about nuclear weapons secret from the American public. _Progressive_ Managing Editor Sam Day, writing for the Pacific News Service, said that his magazine had “set out to demonstrate that principle by showing that atomic secrets are not secret at all, and that the secrecy laws tend only to thwart the public’s sole defense against the ultimate weapons, ‘aroused understanding’ ”—that phrase also borrowed from Einstein. Debunking the state’s assertion that publishing the H-bomb article could only further nuclear proliferation, Day declared that “we intend to show that our secrecy laws do not prevent proliferation; they only serve to lull the public into believing that proliferation can be prevented and to discourage the public from gaining an ‘aroused understanding’ of nuclear weapons. In the meantime, little or nothing is being done by the government to stop proliferation or to resolve the dangers of manufacturing and storing these weapons.” It’s not surprising, but still philosophically painful, to see Day take facts that strongly support the libertarian view and somehow produce the cup of hemlock so deeply adored by liberal philosophers: a clarion call for more and more wide-ranging intervention and regulation by the state—the source of the whole mess in the first place. Asking the Atomic Energy Commission or Nuclear Regulatory Commission or even some other branch of government to act as protector for all citizens is comparable to asking Vlad the Impaler to be protector for all children in Romania. As far back as 1950 the AEC prevented publication of parts of articles that it felt must remain “secret.” Gerald Piel, publisher of _Scientific American_, has written in _The New_ _York Times_ that his magazine acceded to “ritual cuts” in an article in the April 1950 issue, and therefore published a “mutilated” piece. He emphasized that the key to building a bomb is not the scientific and engineering theories—which are, despite the government’s protestations, quite public— but rather a solid industrial and scientific base, and concluded: > “If a hydrogen bomb turns up in the hands of Idi Amin or some terrorist gang, it will not be from a recipe published in a magazine. Very likely, it will be one of our own bombs, deployed within their reach by a blundering decision made in secret.” Marshall E. Schwartz is a contributing editor of LR.