INSIDE AT LOS ALAMOS
Day, Samuel H. Jr.
Incident at Los Alamos Officials of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory faced a ticklish problem one morning last May when an American Civil Liberties Union researcher, Dmitri Rotow, discovered...
...But for others the lesson is the opposite: When everything is secret, nothing is secret...
...Samuel H. Day Jr...
...Incident at Los Alamos Officials of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory faced a ticklish problem one morning last May when an American Civil Liberties Union researcher, Dmitri Rotow, discovered that during the night a document had been stolen from his workpile in the laboratory's public library...
...The formerly secret data turned up in boxfuls at the national archives...
...Three-fifths of them were declassified...
...To do so would have been to violate their own rule against identification of "secret/restricted data...
...When, years later, the Department of Energy had second thoughts about this, it was discovered that records had been kept on only 19,000 of the 1.5 million documents declassified by the AEC...
...He has called on Representative Pete McCloskey of California to seek repeal of the Atomic Energy Act provision which declares all nuclear weapons information to be "secret at birth" — the provision invoked by the Department of Energy against The Progressive...
...The Government's ostensible reason for abandoning its six-month effort to block the Morland article was the publication on September 16 by the Madison Press Connection of a letter by a California nuclear weapons hobbyist, Charles Hansen, giving similar descriptions of hydrogen bomb design principles...
...By then it was too late...
...Of the 19,000, the Department concluded that at least ninety-one — all dealing with nuclear weapons — had been declassified in error...
...Dmitri Rotow's find, a detailed technical report on hydrogen bomb design, was one of the erroneously declassified documents...
...And, secrets being what they are, if their well-funded and supported professionals can't figure things out for themselves, there are always ours to help them...
...The laboratory officials resolved their dilemma by doing what seems to come naturally in the Department of Energy: They covered up...
...The Atomic Energy Commission (predecessor of the Department of Energy), taking the instructions to heart, reviewed no fewer than 2.8 million documents over the next five years and declassified well over half of them...
...Or should they simply say nothing, keep the document, and hope that Rotow had not taken the precaution of making a copy...
...is managing editor of The Progressive...
...Samuel H. Day Jr...
...Comptroller General Elmer R. Staats's report on an investigation of security "leaks" at Los Alamos...
...The wraps were lifted from hundreds of thousands of documents in the regional repositories of the AEC and in the files of companies that do business with the nuclear weapons designers...
...Not until after he had gone did they learn he had made a copy of the document...
...And, paradoxically, it could also rescue the secrecy mystique that the article successfully challenged...
...The laboratory officials got rid of the visitor by closing the library on a pretext...
...Anything that can be figured out by amateurs...
...Recent events underscore the folly and futility of such application...
...would long since have been deduced by the well-funded and supported staff of professional scientists that would be employed by any nation interested in researching the H-bomb...
...In 1971, in the aftermath of the Government's unsuccessful attempt to suppress publication of the Pentagon Papers, President Nixon ordered a review of the mountains of secret documents that had been accumulating over the years in various Federal agencies...
...Senator Majority Leader Robert Byrd of West Virginia is among those who have joined the chorus of demands for stricter classification rules...
...But by then the Government already had learned of a fatal blow to its case...
...The incident involving Dmitri Rotow, it turned out, was only the tip of the iceberg...
...For Senator John Glenn of Ohio, for whose subcommittee the Comptroller General's report was prepared, the lesson from all this is that the nuclear weapons designers should keep tighter hold of their "secrets...
...The researcher already had distributed dozens of copies of a report which the Department of Energy admits is a highly sensitive description of hydrogen bomb design...
...The Los Alamos incident, more than anything else, may have been the straw that broke the back of the Government's case against publication of Howard Morland's article on "The H-Bomb Secret" in The Progressive...
...Should they admit they had taken the document in the belief it had been mistakenly declassified...
...And not until he had broadcast that fact at a Congressional hearing did they make any effort to get in touch with him...
...One who holds that view is Ray E. Kidder, a nuclear weapons physicist at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory...
...It seems reasonable that an interested party could have obtained the lists of declassified documents and the actual documents," the Comptroller General concluded...
...Faced with the finding that it had itself been a massive purveyor of technical data on hydrogen bomb design, the Department of Energy was hard-pressed to maintain the credibility of its case against publication of a private citizen's work that, in its technical sophistication, seemed pale by comparison...
...In a burst of energy that may stand as an enduring record in declassification history, a twenty-five member team rolled up its sleeves at Los Alamos in the winter of 1973 and reviewed 388,092 documents in twenty-four working days — an average of one every two seconds...
...It seems unnecessary, unreasonable, and unworkable to apply the 'born secret' concept to private citizens and newspaper reporters who have never had access to restricted data," Kidder wrote McCloskey in a recent letter...
...Four days earlier, on September 12, the Department of Energy got its first look at U.S...
Vol. 43 • December 1979 • No. 12
