A NATION BESET BY CONFUSION AND TEAR

...That may be a premature and overly pessimistic assessment on my part, but I have been stunned to find how many Americans, including many American journalists, are still living in the age of nuclear monopoly, secrets, and the Rosenbergs...

...But pushing the button of "We've Got a Secret" almost guaranteed that the public discussion would spin out into fantasyland...

...Athird paradox is that The Press Connection is bearing the brunt of the public's vast bitterness and cynicism toward the corporate media...

...In this simple-minded society, the two notions of "Chicago Tribune" and "betrayer of national security" could not have fit together in the same peanut-sized compartment...

...They deal in simple categories and oppositions — good guys and bad guys, patriots and traitors, secrets and stoolies...

...Other, larger newspapers were prepared to make the same challenge...

...The liberal Washington Post, on the other hand, automatically accepted the official line on nuclear secrecy and has called on the Government to prosecute the editors of The Press Connection to the full extent of the law...

...In a way, I regret that The Progressive chose to title its suppressed story "The H-Bomb Secret: How We Got It, Why We're Telling It...

...Letter after letter accuses us of playing fast and loose with national security in order to work an angle...

...The magazine's idea was to point up the contradictions about a "secret" that is not a secret at all — but mass media do not deal in contradictions...

...I halfway suspect that if The Progressive had simply gone ahead and published Morland's article with some homely title like "A Citizen's Guide to the H-bomb" or "Everything You Wanted to Know About the H-bomb (But Were Afraid to Ask)," the whole flap might have evaporated...

...The purpose of The Press Connection in publishing the letter was to advance the debate and to demonstrate our own conviction as to the Tightness and safety of The Progressive s position by putting our very freedom on the line...

...This experience has left us all shaking our heads...

...Even as it took Three Mile Island to explode the myths of safe nuclear energy and expert infallibility and turn mainstream opinion toward energy Ron McCrea is the editor of The Madison (Wisconsin) Press Connection, in which this article appeared in somewhat longer form...

...alternatives, it seems dismayingly likely that nothing short of a similar "demonstration effect" can shatter American ignorance about the present state of nuclear weapons proliferation and availability...

...Most painfully to me, they say: You probably did it because you had nothing much to lose...

...Inevitably, there was the question about how we expected the fortunes of The Press Connection to be affected by all the publicity...

...joyed, that people on the staff were close to breaking down because of the pressures of trying to produce a newspaper in the middle of a media zoo...

...If the performance of the media has so jaded and embittered Americans as to believe, as they seem to, that the press will go so far as to sell out the country for private gain and hide behind the First Amendment, then the time is not far away when a government that wishes to restrict the press severely will be able to do so with substantial popular support...

...Not only are we not disarming (as we pledged to do eleven years ago in the Nonproliferation Treaty), we are passing out bullets...

...Some were blunt enough to ask directly whether our motive wasn't strictly commercial...

...The contradictions would have exploded and people would have been forced, if not to think twice, then to think at least one-and-a-half times about what the hell was really going on...

...The only major newspaper in the country to throw down the gauntlet over the Hansen letter was the Chicago Tribune, long the Mighty Wurlitzer of heartland conservatism...

...2) The Government dropped its case against The Progressive because the "secret" was out...

...As a result, the attention has been ours, the backlash has been ours, and the terribly sobering realizations about the state of national consciousness have been ours...

...Government's untenable posture in The Progressive case and to argue for a rational revision of the classification policy of the Atomic Energy Act, a law written in the era of nuclear monopoly and unsuited to today's need for open discussion of a runaway technology...

...That provocative headline, whose irony has been totally lost in press coverage, set the tone for the whole hysterical non-debate that has occurred in the last several months...

...is being heard more and more these days, especially as grass-roots movements pose serious opposition to nuclear power and the corporate perpetration of food, energy, housing, and health-care inflation...

...The homely headlines would not have expressed The Progressive's challenge to the nuclear establishment, which was, of course, the point, and it's probably true that James Schlesinger and Griffin Bell, living in their barricaded worlds, would have taken action anyway...

...virtually every news reporter who came into The Press Connection for interviews about the Hansen letter did also...

...But we were the first...

...Asecond sad conclusion I have reached is that another modern technology — the technology of mass media and instant information — has made Americans less, not more, capable of dealing with life-and-death issues of national policy...

...I might add that not only do readers and viewers assume this...

...The country is so cynical, and the press so jaded itself, that no one can deal with the idea anymore that anyone might do something out of simple conviction...

...The cry of "Too much democracy...

...Even more ironically, press treatment of a story like ours shows just how well placed that mistrust is...

...They do not realize that the Original Sin was committed long ago, that the apple has been off the tree for decades, that all the world has eaten of it, and that a worldwide act of penance — disarmament — is necessary immediately to redeem humanity from the hellfires of a rapidly impending atomic Judgment Day...

...and (3) The Government is now trying to find who leaked the "secret" and deciding whom to prosecute...

...After thirty years of saturation bombardment by slogans, messages, and thirty-second spots, we have become a nation of headline readers and grabbers-on-the go, almost disabled when it comes to understanding an event that does not fit into easy categories...

...No one seemed especially convinced, and I read in this attitude and the attitude of our letter writers the most profound threat of all...

...In a curious way, some of the most clear-eyed understanding of the action of The Press Connection and of the issue of nuclear secrecy has come from conservatives...

...I tried to explain again and again that no one risks a twenty-year prison term for publicity, that the publicity was not something we had asked for or en'The liberal Washington Post .. .automatically accepted the official line on nuclear secrecy...

...My last observation is about liberals and conservatives...

...Make them yours as well...

...The irony is that while the focus of discussion is the containment of nuclear weapons information — a futile exercise at this point in history — the urgent issue of containing the spread of nuclear weapons fuels, which are a byproduct of every atomic reactor we export, is largely a matter of public indifference...

...This turn of affairs makes me wish we had withheld publication and let the Tribune go forward first...

...The world has changed, knowledge of the means of ultimate 'This experience has left us all shaking our heads' destruction has become universal, yet Americans are cocooned in illusion...

...Numerous letter writers have suggested that if the bombs start falling it will be because people like us and The Progressive had the temerity to write about forbidden things...

...The writer's purpose was to underscore the U.S...

...we had everything to lose, and we were closer to the brink of losing it than, say, the Chicago Tribune, which had announced plans to publish the Hansen letter and eventually did so...

...As a result of that simple scenario going out across the country as the essence of the story, the backlash against us in the mail (and in some editorials) has been predictably furious...

...I told them they were wrong to think that because we were small and strapped we had nothing much to lose...

...Ironically, at the moment when the institution of the free press has become most critical in explaining and furthering these movements, trust in that press is about at its nadir...

...And yet it is information that Americans perceive as the threat to their security...

...Thus, for many people around the country, the story has been: (1) A Wisconsin "alternative" newspaper published "secret" designs for the H-bomb...

...Modern media have destroyed literacy and stripped us of subtlety...

...REFLECTIONS A nation beset by confusion and fear Ron McCrea On September 16, The Madison Press Connection published a letter from a citizen to a Senator which contained a general discussion of the design and dynamics of the hydrogen bomb entirely drawn from public sources...

...to milk publicity for dollars and readers...

...Unfortunately, because this illusion is so firmly entrenched, even a nuclear war might not bring home the proper point...

...We also sought to right the relations of press to government by challenging the bizarre theory of "retroactive classification" with a simple act of publication...

...Today, after assessing press and citizen response, 1 am almost persuaded that it will take an actual nuclear war somewhere in the world to make Americans wake up to the scientific realities of the 1980s...

...to sensationalize a grave issue for our own gain...

...Unfortunately, we were not thinking tactically but rather ethically and professionally on that sunny Saturday afternoon when we decided to publish the harmless letter of a citizen to a Senator...