ATOMIC SECRECY: FUEL FOR THE COLD WAR

...It is no more than an essential first step in the search for an alternative to the arms race as a basis for U.S...

...This goal has been scaled down, but nuclear technology exports are continuing to boom...

...In a free country like ours, such questions should be debated by the people," Smyth wrote...

...Its development raises many questions that must be answered in the near future...

...It was an early presage of President Truman's decision, in 1950, to order development of the hydrogen bomb...

...The Manhattan Project scientists understood that nuclear fission was not a magic potion which only an anointed few had been fortunate enough to stumble upon...

...The test of a large atomic bomb in Nevada in April 1953 led to unexpected radioactive fallout as far east as New York state and to the ingestion of high levels of radioactive iodine by children in southern Utah...

...The desire of the Truman Administration and its supporters in Congress to foster a mystique of secrecy — even against the advice of leading scientists — can best be understood in the context of the emerging Cold War and its budding competition in the political, economic, and military sectors...

...The trial, conviction, and execution, some years later, of "atom spies" Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, also accused of passing atomic secrets, drove such anxieties deep into the consciousness of millions of Americans...

...The success of the United States, the Soviet Union, China, Britain, and France in crossing the thermonuclear threshold made it clear that the data were not really restricted from those with the will and capacity to make H-bombs...

...Secretary of State James Byrnes had a political agenda more conventional than that of the scientists...

...Within such a psychological climate, the Soviet A-bomb test that broke the American monopoly in September 1949 — years before it was expected by political leaders, if not by scientists — along with the arrest of Klaus Fuchs, a British scientist who admitted 'Lifting the veil . . .is not an end in itself' passing atomic information to the Russians, helped foster an obsessive concern with secrecy...

...But the case of Dr...

...As early as the fall of 1945, a scientific panel advised Secretary of State Byrnes that a new weapon even more powerful than the A-bomb was technically feasible...

...The political formulations of Senator Joseph McCarthy were rooted in the early policies of the Atomic Energy Commission...

...Though economists in the tradition of John Maynard Keynes argued that Government spending could be focused on such social purposes as public housing or mass transit, economic and political leaders feared that spending for these ends would undermine the social structure by fostering greater equality and removing important sources of private investment...

...Following a prolonged period of economic expansion during World War I and the postwar decade, American productive capacity had grown to a point where an underpaid labor force could no longer absorb enough goods to keep the economy moving...

...they are political and social questions, and the answers given to them may affect all mankind for generations...

...The new Atomic Energy Commission was given carte blanche to determine what kinds of information would fit the category...

...Public fears of treachery and treason were easily played upon to foster hysterical intolerance of those whose ideologies questioned the social order...

...While economic and military elites may not have contrived the May case, they benefited immensely from its contribution to the mystique of nuclear secrecy...

...In the depth of the Great Depression, unemployment hovered at around a quarter of the labor force and the Gross National Product fell to almost half its 1929 level...

...His assessment was widely shared...

...The most basic decisions about the development and deployment of new weapons systems have been made by a select few...

...Even members of the community were potential enemies, those who know the location of the pass most of all, since through treason or indiscretion they might reveal the secret...

...Only information produced by Government laboratories should be restricted...

...Despite the Administration's view, the atomic scientists had a substantial impact on Congressional development of an atomic energy statute...

...In 1945, the United States had just emerged from the most severe depression in its history...

...The need for protection of the "secret" became the linchpin of the Cold War and a major force in preserving the power of those who profit from that global struggle...

...exports...

...The postwar solution to that problem was to foster a demand for the products of U.S...

...Although the value of Fuchs's contribution to the Soviet atomic weapons program was questionable, his case helped reinforce the popular notion that atomic secrets are embodied in a mysterious formula that can be scribbled on pieces of paper and quickly converted into weapons of mass destruction...

...And the technological connections between nuclear power and nuclear weapons have been consistently shielded from public view...

...Alan Nunn May, the world's first known "atomic spy," sent shock waves through the American body politic...

...World War II showed that high levels of Government spending could keep the economy from such downturns...

...The legacy of the Cold War, which gave postwar American imperialism its powerfui eariy thrust, lives on today in the form of the Atomic Energy Act...

...The mystique of secrecy also has allowed the atomic weapons establishment to conceal the consequences of its decisions...

...The scientists feared that construction of such a weapon could also be undertaken by other industrially and scientifically advanced nations and that a U.S...

...As Howard Morland's article demonstrates, the principal barrier to the development of thermonuclear weapons is not ignorance of a secret but the lack of the necessary scientific and industrial capacity...

...prosperity and security...

...nuclear policy: They argued that the basic scientific principles of atomic physics might be widely known, but the "engineering" was not...

...Drive to Stop Communism Abroad Means Heavy Financial Outlays for Bases, Relief, Reconstruction...

...No arms control advocates were present for its debates because none had received the necessary Government clearance...

...sion of World War II, the scientists who had built the atomic bomb argued that the public should have more information about nuclear matters and that scientists should be freed from wartime constraints on the conduct and publication of their research efforts...

...That part, they said, should be kept secret...

...As if in confirmation, headlines in Business Week summarized the prevalent business view in early 1946: "U.S...

...He argued in October 1945, and subsequently, that too much attention was being paid to "impractical" notions of international control of the atom...

...It made us feel somewhat as though we were a community hidden away in some remote mountain fastness approachable only through a secret pass, and thus immune to attack so long as the location of the pass could be kept hidden from strangers...

...The struggle had already begun in the afterglow of Alamagordo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki...

...J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the project, knew that the Soviets could build their own bomb within a few years should they choose to do so...

...Early drafts accepted the free dissemination of scientific information as the basic principle which should govern legislation in this field...

...These questions are not technical questions...

...The problem is one of markets...

...But in Return, American Business is Bound to Get New Markets Abroad...

...Science may have no boundaries, he said, but Stalin did...

...Today, the secrecy mystique continues to limit the civil liberties of those who would challenge U.S...

...His contribution to the budding Soviet atomic weapons program — offered in the spirit of international science — was negligible...

...When President Eisenhower broached his "Atoms for Peace" plan in 1953, the Government hoped to market more than 3,000 nuclear reactors by the end of the century...

...In the domestic arena, the atomic secrecy mystique intensified the Cold War mentality of political repression...

...None was more cognizant of the need for openness than Henry D. Smyth, author of the Government's official report on the wartime Manhattan Project, which was published six days after Hiroshima: "Here is a new tool for mankind, a tool of unimaginable destructive power...

...He and President Truman pushed a countervailing notion that came to dominate U.S...

...They called it "restricted data...

...His role in America's wartime Manhattan Project had been peripheral...

...The newly formed Special Committee on Atomic Energy decided that because it was not always clear where science leaves off and technology begins, a new category was needed to encompass any scientific and technical information that might require restriction...

...Had the mystique of secrecy not beclouded the public's understanding of that elementary fact, no judge could have held that any article — no matter how accurate or detailed — would give Idi Amin the H-bomb...

...In a similar fashion, the mystique of secrecy has allowed the Government to withhold information on the safety hazards of nuclear power, an offshoot of its secret weapons program...

...They recognized that it was the achievement of scientists from many nations...

...The primary commitment of the nation's political leadership was not to ending the incipient arms race but to preserving and expanding U.S...

...Alan Barth, an editorial writer for The Washington Post, observed perceptively in 1949: "The myth of monopoly immeasurably aggravated our sense of vulnerability and insecurity...

...The emphasis of the bill shifted from information dissemination to information control...

...But lifting the wraps from the policy of secrecy and the interests it serves is not an end in itself...

...As a result, all strangers seemed to be dangerous enemies...

...Atomic secrecy: fuel for the cold war The myth served a powerful few John Buell In February 1946, six months after the destruction of Hiroshima established the United States as the world's first nuclear superpower, an obscure British scientist made headlines by admitting that while working in the Canadian atomic energy program he had leaked secrets to agents of the Soviet Union...

...There are now more than 200 reactors around the globe, most of them American, and each produces about 500 pounds of plutonium — enough to make about twenty-five atomic bombs...

...If there is no secret, and if the Department of Energy knew that, why did the Government assert the opposite so strenuously...

...decision to develop it might lead to a qualitative and quantitative arms race fraught with the utmost danger...

...And it cast an imprint — as indelible as it was pernicious — on the nation's first formative efforts to forge public policy in the virgin field of atomic energy...

...The mystique of secrecy has thus deprived Americans of information and perspectives which would seriously have undermined public consent to the arms race, the Cold War, and related domestic policies...

...We can't consume everything we produce without changing our fundamental social structure...

...The General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission had felt that the H-bomb question was "so filled with serious implications" that it should be decided only as part of broad national policy, and that much of the information needed for a judgment could and should be made public...

...global power...

...Dean Acheson put the problem in a nutshell when he wrote in 1945: "We cannot go through another depression like the Thirties without far-reaching consequences for our economic and social system...

...And that notion serves to disguise the fact that our Government is the real nuclear proliferator...

...It created something worse than a 'Maginot Line' complex...

...Secrecy has helped sustain that process by narrowing the circle of decisionmakers...

...Lifting the veil of secrecy from the nuclear weapons program would show how the notion of atomic secrecy has been manipulated since the beginning of the nuclear age to chill public debate...

...nuclear policy...

...In the first months after the concluJohn Buell is an associate editor of The Progressive...

...Throughout its case against The Progressive, and in subsequent threats to investigate scientists who aided the magazine in its effort to publish "The H-Bomb Secret," the Government has jeopardized those liberties anew in its impassioned defense of the doctrine of "restricted data...

...Despite the prevalent view of the scientific community, political leaders preferred to tell the public that the United States had a secret — one it had to keep at all cost...

...Perhaps it is because the secrecy myth serves to sustain the notion that the key to preventing nuclear weapons proliferation is keeping a "secret" out of the hands of other nations...

...The ten-year sentence meted to him by a British court returned him quickly to anonymity...

...A basic ingredient of that alternative must be the redistribution of economic resources and economic power...

...But the atomic spy stories of early 1946 changed the balance of forces in Congress...

...capitalism without threatening its political underpinnings...

...They recommended immediate international control of the atom...

...It also justified a permanent arms race, which meant lucrative cost-plus contracts for two-thirds of the fifty largest corporations...

...Despite knowledge of these dangers, Government scientists withheld the facts and ridiculed the concerns of local residents...

...Byrnes responded that this new intelligence was all the more reason for American scientists to go back to their drawing boards...

...An "international Communist conspiracy" helped justify efforts to keep the "free world" open to U.S...

...One of them, Herbert York, now a critic of the process, points out that fewer than 100 scientists and political leaders made the fateful H-bomb decision...

...But the Committee's deliberations were never opened to the public...

...The Smyth report was not a "blueprint" for the A-bomb, but it presented a wealth of specific detail on how the scientists and engineers had built it...