THE OTHER NECLEAR WEAPONS CLUB

...He had secured a copy from one of the half-dozen sources to whom the scientists had sent copies, made copies of his own, and mailed them around the country...

...Unsure of the Daily Californian s intentions, the Department rushed into Federal court in San Francisco on Saturday evening, September 15, to secure an injunction against the student newspaper...

...But the meat of the letter was in what Hansen called "a brief history...

...That was all the encouragement Hansen needed...

...Tell Howard I'm sorry if I spoiled it for him," said a jubilant Chuck Hansen...

...There could be few groups more ideologically distant from The Progressive or more fundamentally at home with Pentagon notions of "national security...

...In arguing that the principles of thermonuclear weaponry are already well known (though classified in the United States), the brief repeated the substance of the Fusion article and thereby spread on the open court record a virtual paraphrase of what the court was holding in secret...

...is managing editor of The Progressive...

...Such mistakes demonstrated the absurdities of the classification program and lent credibility to our argument that the Morland material was already in the public domain...

...Last winter, as it was preparing to take The Progressive to court to suppress "secret/restricted data" about the hydrogen bomb, the United States Government chose to ignore the fact that the same material had just appeared in much greater detail in a political magazine written for a technical readership specializing in the science which underlies the design of thermonuclear weapons...

...A fourth Argonne scientist, Theodore Postol, also an adviser, submitted two defense affidavits in the same vein...

...It was provided by the H-bomb amateurs: There is no secret...

...The answers will come later...

...Thus, by spilling "The Secret of Laser Fusion" in an article spiced with thermonuclear fusion concepts they knew to be "secret/restricted data," the Fusion editors hoped to challenge the Department of Energy's classification program...

...At about the same time, the Government submitted an affidavit by a nuclear weapons design consultant, Jack Rosengren, depicting Morland's design as not just an ordinary H-bomb (as the author had described it) but as a representation of the most efficient weapon in the U.S...

...Toward the end of the summer an aide contacted Hansen and asked to be kept informed...

...The Argonne scientists reasoned that a careful investigator could conclude from this that the Government had accidentally identified Teller's encyclopedia diagrams (which themselves had never been cleared for security) as the key to the design of the most efficient H-bomb...

...Already the Hansen letter was multiplying — as were the consequences...

...pearance of this issue of Fusion maga-zine, Energy Secretary James Schlesinger and his staff will begin circulating the story — if not attempting legal prosecution — that the information in 'The Secret of Laser Fusion' is classified...

...The article, drawn mainly from the international literature (some of it 120 years old), focused tantalizingly and explicitly on the same supposed secrets that were to be at issue in the Morland article...

...Few of the H-bomb amateurs shared all those assumptions, but their collective efforts helped make our point about the H-bomb secret...

...of some of the theoretical ideas which led to the concepts now at issue in The Progressive case...

...And tell him that it wasn't my best effort...

...The Department threatened to refer the matter to the FBI...

...For openers, Hansen drew up a bill of particulars against three Government weapons experts — Edward Teller, George Rathjens of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Theodore Taylor of Princeton — saying they, not The Progressive, should be charged with spilling nuclear secrets...

...On August 30, his home-town newspaper, The Peninsula Times-Tribune of Palo Alto, printed a story about his charges, reproducing the crude diagram he had provided but making no effort to decipher his physics...

...Glenn and Percy both expressed amazement...

...The first to make the connection was a Milwaukee Sentinel reporter, Joe Manning...

...For all their paranoid overtones, the Fusion Energy Society's article and brief were persuasive indictments of the irrationality of the Government's classification program and of the Government's heavy-handed influence on freedom of scientific inquiry and freedom of the press...

...And they did so with dedicated energy...

...What hope there may be that human sanity will yet prevail is best reflected by a message from one amateur to another telephoned to The Progressive on the night the Government dropped its case...

...Under the secrecy rules of the case, the Department of Energy had an opportunity to censor all materials...

...It's a secret The following footnote from a defendants' brief in The Progressive case was at first censored by the Government and subsequently released for public filing in the court record: "All electromagnetic radiation travels at the speed of light...

...Denied a test case of its own, the Fusion Energy Society jumped into The Progressive case in hopes of upsetting the "conspiracy" by ensuring a victory for The Progressive, not the Government...

...But first there had to be an answer to the question of the H-bomb secret...

...But Hansen's heaviest ammunition was still to come...

...Before the ink was even dry the presses were preparing to roll 2,000 miles away...

...Will the publication of the Morland article strengthen the First Amendment by demonstrating that it can be exercised, albeit at great cost, even in so highly sensitized an area as H-bomb secrecy...

...By this time, the Department of Energy was putting out unintentional hints of its own...

...Any particulate matter must travel at less than the speed of light...

...The lawyers and experts who defended our right to publish "The H-Bomb Secret" are still legally restrained from saying whether they complained about the Government's double standard and what they tried to do about it...

...On Monday, September 17, the Justice Department announced it was abandoning its case against The Progressive...

...Their prestige as nuclear weapons experts blunted the Government's allegations that national security had been endangered and made the First Amendment fight a safer one for others who were unwilling to take The Progressive's claims on faith...

...At the Daily Californian, editor Tom Abate and his staff also wondered...

...Diagrams accompanying the Teller article explicitly detail the H-bomb's unusual configuration...

...Demonstrating that hydrogen bomb design information could be readily obtained from public sources, and then revealing and commenting on it, was for us a means to an end...

...But the painstaking efforts of others to bring the material to light eventually forced abandonment of the case...

...The "brief history" consisted of a puzzle into which Hansen had carefully fitted pieces from Fusion magazine, the "amicus curiae" brief of the Fusion Energy Society, the Teller diagram, and the Rosengren affidavit...

...The contribution of the Fusion Energy Society toward cracking the Government's case was rich in irony...

...These were considerations which also weighed heavily with other H-bomb amateurs...

...The Government later admitted in court that the two documents would have been as valuable to an H-bomb designer as anything in the Morland article...

...This affidavit, too, escaped censorship...

...Enlisting the support of his Congressman, Representative Pete Mc-Closkey, Hansen bombarded Department of Energy officialdom with letters challenging their conduct of the case...

...Incensed by what they regarded as security breaches by the Government itself, they spelled this all out in a letter to Senator John Glenn of Ohio, chairman of a Senate subcommittee that oversees national security matters...

...One of the recipients, the student-run Daily Californian at Berkeley, defied a Department of Energy warning and printed the text of the letter...

...Publication of Hansen's letter by The Press Connection in Madison, Wisconsin, the following day, coupled with a threat by the Chicago Tribune to do the same unless taken to court, ensured the final triumph of the H-bomb amateurs...

...To the society and to the editors of Fusion magazine, the problem was not with the H-bombs themselves but with secrecy as a mechanism for protecting and strengthening the nation's technological lead in H-bombs and other forms of modern weaponry...

...When the Government ignored Fusion's published report and concentrated instead on suppression of Morland's unpublished article, the magazine concluded there was a conspiracy between The Progressive and the Department of Energy to set up an easy test case that would establish the Government's right to suppress scientific research and industrial development in the field of fusion energy...

...Proliferation of the forbidden Argonne letter re-ignited Senator Percy's interest in the case...

...In the Fusion Energy Society's view, we and Energy Secretary Schlesinger were in the same despised environmentalist, anti-technology camp...

...The first entry to be classified by Griffin would be the automatic winner...

...Fascinated by the case and enthusiastic in his support of the magazine's cause, he quickly became a sidewalk superintendent, orchestrating his own campaign of harassment against the Department of Energy...

...Before the Department of Energy declared the Argonne scientists' letter to Senator Glenn to be "secret/restricted data," Hansen already had moved into high gear...

...None of the four Argonne scientists shared The Progressive's conviction that publication of the Morland article would serve a useful purpose...

...Most of them counseled vigorously against publication because they thought Morland's science was sloppy and his political point dubious...

...On the same day, a Milwaukee nuclear weapons hobbyist, Jerry Fass, interviewed by the Sentinel's Joe Manning, checked in with another successful description of the H-bomb "secret," but already the fat was in the fire...

...Hansen thoughtfully mailed copies to a half-dozen newspapers — and to the Department of Energy...

...Another hint came with the filing of a "friend-of-the-court" brief by the Fusion Energy Society, publishers of Fusion...

...Seeking evidence to bolster the magazine's contention that H-bomb design information is readily available, an investigator for the American Civil Liberties Union, Dmitri Rotow (himself an amateur nuclear weapons designer) , visited the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory public library and pulled from the open shelf a highly sensitive and highly technical H-bomb report, UCRL-4725...

...Hansen, a Palo Alto computer programmer, had spent five years writing a book about nuclear weapons...

...Although there was no way for others to know what the Department of Energy found objectionable in the Morland article, the relevance of the Fusion article to the case gradually became apparent to a few outsiders...

...Within days, eighteen pages of single-spaced type were on their way to Senator Percy...

...Throughout the spring he drove the Department's chief classification officer, John Griffin, to distraction by organizing an "H-bomb design contest...

...Other newspapers — The Oakland Tribune, The San Jose Mer'Tell Howard I'm sorry if I spoiled it lor him' cury News, The Milwaukee Sentinel, and The Wall Street Journal — sat back and wondered whether they had a story...

...For scientists at Argonne and at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory who had read the Morland article and knew its publication would be harmless to the national interest, it was easy to support publication on First Amendment grounds...

...But the Government's act of suppression made them defenders of our right to publish it...

...Glenn and another subcommittee member, Senator Charles Percy of Illinois, had already tangled with the Department of Energy on another matter involving The Progressive case...

...stockpile...

...For good measure, he included a diagram drawn with the aid of a tuna fish can and some jar lids...

...His speculative linking of the two gave a helpful clue to other amateurs in pursuit of the H-bomb "secret...

...But the Department's bizarre behavior also distorted the issues of the case by suggesting that the answer to the problem lay in more secrecy, rather than less...

...Hoping to duplicate Morland's feat, he wrote an explanation of the workings of the hydrogen bomb after spending a week reading library sources, one of which was the Fusion article...

...Not only is secrecy self-defeating in this regard, they argued, but it also retards the nation's general scientific-industrial progress, notably in fusion energy, which is the society's pet project...

...Therefore, we want to make it clear that this article is based on information made public by the Soviet Union and readily available in Soviet and other international scientific circles, as well as upon information contained in a scientific paper published by Bernhard Riemann in 1859...

...Morland's purpose in writing the article, and The Progressive's purpose in publishing it, was to dispel the secrecy mystique that protects and nourishes the nuclear weapons program...

...The Department promptly closed the library and reclassified the report and an equally sen-sitive companion document, UCRL-5280...

...We wanted to raise the level of public consciousness about America's continuing preparations for nuclear war...

...The blunders of the Department of Energy — the closing of a public library and the attempted suppression of citizens' letters to their Senators to cover its own mistakes — vastly weakened the Government's case...

...The society's unsolicited "friend-of-the-court" brief, filed in the open record and loaded with "secret/restricted data" culled from scientific journals, was a loaded cannon pointed at the Government's case...

...They had their answer a few days later when, on September 12, word came that the Hansen letter — like the one they printed three months earlier — had just been classified "secret/restricted data...

...For a few hectic days the Department of Energy scurried from newspaper to newspaper, attempting to retrieve its "secret...

...The scientists asked the Senator to investigate the Department of Energy...

...If there was any lesson Senators Glenn and Percy seemed to draw from the case, it was that...

...In the earliest days of the case, three Argonne National Laboratory physicists, Alex DeVolpi, Gerald Marsh, and George Stanford (our scientific advisers for the Morland article), filed a "friends-of-the-court" affidavit documenting public sources from which design principles for the H-bomb could be learned...

...Among those who followed these developments with an eagle eye was Charles Hansen, a California nuclear weapons hobbyist...

...Six other college newspapers later followed suit...

...Rather than prosecute Fusion, Schlesinger chose to suppress The Progressive, whose author, by coincidence, had selected some of the same "secret/restricted" material to make the same point that information of this sort is readily available to people who know how to look for it...

...The weapons, not the "secrets," were the prime target...

...But by then it was too late...

...Manning's condensation of "The Secret of Laser Fusion" was remarkably close to the pertinent Morland descriptions...

...In the case of the Argonne scientists, the Department let several helpful references slip through, the most valuable of which was a ten-year-old Encyclopedia Americana article by Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb...

...The secrecy rules laid down by Judge Robert W. Warren last March, at the insistence of the Government, made it impossible for participants in the case to draw public attention to "The Secret of Laser Fusion," an unsigned article in the March issue of Fusion magazine, published and distributed unbeknownst to us before publication of Howard Morland's article for The Progressive was blocked on March 9. The editors of Fusion, oblivious to our plan to publish Morland's article in our April issue and to the Government's plan to prevent it, had drawn provocative attention to their own article in an editorial "Note to the Reader": "We fully expect that with the apSamuel H. Day Jr...

...Will the exercise of the right accomplish its intended purpose of emboldening others to look more closely at the H-bomb...

...The three scientific concepts specified by the Department of Energy as "secret" were set forth by Morland in layman's terms and by Fusion in more technical language...

...The Department responded, a month later, by classifying their letter...