A POSTSCRIPT

...My attorney was besieged with calls from newscasters and talk-show hosts...

...It was ignored for the same reason that none of the recent feature films about Vietnam has made a serious effort to portray the Vietnamese honestly...

...Sometimes I include a role for myself in the scenario...

...An anti-nuclear guerrilla theatre stunt I had worked on for a year came to fruition...

...I set out to prove that H-bombs are real — that they have size and shape...

...they are industrial products...

...Walter Cronkite has hardly mentioned nuclear warfare since the Cuban missiles went back to Russia, and he doesn't seem a bit worried about the fact that three officers on any one of our thirty-one Poseidon submarines can start a nuclear war on their own...

...I managed to slip a few purely symbolic messages past the news censors — my basically honest face to show that I'm a nice guy, and a picture of a nuclear weapon with my shoe sitting on top to show the relative size — and to convey my visceral contempt for the Bomb...

...I did not set out to prove that the H-bomb secret was already public knowledge...

...But something almost as improbable did happen last March...

...Its modern variant, television, gives a handful of newscasters the power to tell 200 million Americans what happened in the course of every day, and few people question their judgment about what was important enough to tell...

...Though I have experienced the personal frustration of trying to capitalize on a fleeting notoriety in order to raise a substantive issue, the effort has produced some positive effects...

...It was flattering suddenly to be taken seriously by strangers — especially by famous strangers whose opinions are trusted by millions of Americans...

...If we keep struggling, some day we may actually hear Walter Cronkite announce a reduction in the number of nuclear weapons...

...The CBS camera slowly zooms in on Walter Cronkite's serious, everything's-going-to-be-all-right face as he explains that a Presidential commission has been appointed to investigate the startling allegations, but we should not waste time waiting for the result...

...CBS News has learned that, according to the provisions of the pact, a single act of madness or a simple miscalculation on either side could result in 200 million deaths and the complete destruction of each nation's industrial capacity, as well as radioactive contamination of most agricultural lands...

...Thus, the real censorship in The Progressive's H-bomb secrecy case was not the deletion of technical information from my article...

...it was the longstanding voluntary censorship, especially in the electronic media, which makes it necessary to stage a sideshow in order to call passing attention to the most serious crisis our civilization has ever faced...

...The secrecy that keeps them out of sight and mind does not remove them from our lives...

...If the story of the H-bomb is told without censorship, we cannot avoid acknowledging that the blame for the arms race lies with our own government, not with the Russians...

...The real issue was ignored...

...If the story of the Vietnam war were told from the Vietnamese point of view, it would say too much about our leaders that the financial backers of feature films don't want to know, and don't want us to know...

...When radio was new, Hitler and Roosevelt used it to mesmerize their respective nations with frenzied speeches and cozy fireside chats...

...As they say in New York, "It'll never happen...

...That fact is too true and too close to home to be news...

...America started it, and America bears the primary responsibility for perpetuating it...

...The intended message was that nice guys don't like nukes...

...Walter Cronkite reads the news script: "A young free-lance journalist revealed today that years ago leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union engaged the civilian populations of both nations in a mutual suicide pact...

...The publication of the H-bomb article in this issue of The Progressive is certainly a victory for free speech...

...Ban-the-bomb people are increasingly refusing to take a back seat to ban-the-reactor people in the anti-nuclear movement...

...And it may eventually become a "realistic" position to advocate total withdrawal (as in the case of Vietnam) from the suicide pact inherent in the world's nuclear arsenals...

...For a couple of weeks it seemed the whole world wanted to know how I had learned the H-bomb secret and why I wanted to tell it...

...In my fantasy the network news producers suddenly rediscover the Balance of Terror and shock the nation with word that human civilization has no future unless that future includes nuclear disarmament...

...It is certainly a blow to the mentality embodied in the secrecy provision of the Atomic Energy Act...

...Any situation we have lived with for years is not newsworthy, and anything as profitable as the nuclear arms race is too important to make the Evening News...

...A real danger doesn't become a matter of general concern until Cronkite and his colleagues announce it and describe it in their deadpan, fatherly manner...

...Instead I tried, whenever possible, to make simpler statements in favor of nuclear disarmament, most of which were edited out of my reported comments...

...Years have gone by since any "talking heads" on the CBS Evening News have expressed such a concern...

...We are miles ahead of where we were six months ago, and the peace movement has acquired some of the credibility that has traditionally been reserved for the Edward Tellers of this world...

...Every American should immediately refuse to pay war taxes, publicly renounce the use of nuclear weapons, and demand the conversion of war industries to civilian purposes...

...My own objective was merely to strip the mystery away from nuclear weaponry...

...Such destruction could take place at any time without warning, and be accomplished within hours...

...It was a motive too subtle and too convoluted to be believed, and I soon gave up trying to explain it...

...And so, for some years now, I have nurtured a television fantasy...

...I hoped that demystification of the Bomb would have a therapeutic effect on America's foreign and economic policies...

...The SALT II debate hinges on the irrelevant presence of a few thousand Russians in Cuba...

...They are not score-points in a basketball game between the superpowers...

...By penetrating the nation's most glamorous nuclear "secret," I accomplished something many people thought was impossible, and my name became part of the national news...

...Many of the interviewers were hostile at first, but their attitude only pointed up the paradox that a magazine which advocates nuclear disarmament was trying to publish an article by an anti-nuclear activist — an article revealing "the H-bomb secret...

...But there has been no detectable impact on the mad momentum of the nuclear arms race...

...I appeared several times on national television...

...It was not surprising that the controversy quickly focused on peripheral issues — the Government's power to restrain the press, the sources of my information, how the Government got advance word that The Progressive intended to publish my story, whether its publication would provide Idi Amin with an H-bomb...

...When I tell my friends that I have an overriding concern about the imminence of thermonuclear war, they think I'm living in the past...

...Although I can hardly stand to watch television myself, I understand that most citizens are so fond of the dancing colored lights on the cathode-ray tube that they can hardly take an idea, person, or event seriously unless it has been covered by the electronic picture medium...

...I would rather have relied on a real H-bomb or a set of official blueprints for my description, and the fact that I used publicly available sources and my own imagination diminishes the impact of my account by reducing its credibility and robbing it of concrete detail...

...No one even talks about getting rid of the Bomb...