IDI AMIN AND THE H-BOMB
Piel, Gerard
Idi Amin and the H-bomb The Government has again invoked the power of prior restraint of publication that was written into the Atomic Energy Act of 1946. It has gone into court to try to enjoin The...
...It can only stifle public discussion of the awesome questions that confront Government officials every day...
...In the thirty years since America lost its imagined monopoly on the atomic secret, we should have learned that there never was a secret that could keep another country from making a bomb...
...Then suppose you stop the press...
...I say "again" because the Atomic Energy Commission threatened the same action in an attempt to stop publication of an article about that bomb in the April 1950 issue of Scientific American...
...It has gone into court to try to enjoin The Progressive magazine from publishing an article about the hydrogen bomb...
...It is "all data concerning the manufacture and utilization of atomic weapons" except such data as "the Commission from time to time determines may be published...
...it cannot be dropped inadvertently in a discussion of public policy or even in an overcomplicated popular exposition...
...But that kind of secret takes a lot of explaining and, nowadays, a carload of computer printouts...
...With much else to say about this abrogation of the First Amendment rights of the Scientific American, I ask a pragmatic question: What hazard can publication pose to military secrecy and the national security...
...What is more, five of the six countries that have made an atomic bomb have then made a hydrogen bomb...
...The atomic secret is defined in that same Atomic Energy Act...
...The language confounded ignorance with secrecy...
...We acceded to ritual cuts made by AEC agents on security grounds and published a mutilated article...
...All data" needed to make the atomic and hydrogen bombs were in the public domain of the world community of physics in 1939...
...there is no evidence that the Indians do not know how to make a hydrogen bomb too...
...Very likely, it will be one of our own bombs, deployed within their reach by a blundering decision made in secret...
...If there was a secret so easily disclosed and it ever got as far as imminent publication in the news media, it must already have leaked into the channels of communication that count in the espionage business...
...Gerard Piel The New York Times March 26, 1979 (Gerald Piel is publisher of Scientific A merican...
...How does that stop the pressmen, the typographers, the proofreaders, the typists, the editors, the unpublished author with the secret in his head, and all the other leaks in the line all the way back to the first leak in the security system itself...
...The power of prior restraint of publication is not invoked to protect any other military secret in peacetime...
...It is not a secret that stops the next bomb but the lack of the industrial and scientific base on which to proceed, or the decision, for the present, not to...
...If a hydrogen bomb turns up in the hands of Idi Amin or some terrorist gang, it will not be made from a recipe published in a magazine...
...There are various ways to make these weapons and there are wrinkles in the manufacturing that are secrets of the trade-secret kind...
Vol. 43 • May 1979 • No. 5
