THE H-BOMB 'SECRET'
MORLAND, HOWARD
The H-bomb 'secret' Learning it is easy, once you know the handshake Howard Norland Every three hours of every working day America produces a device with the explosive power of many trainloads...
...I was to learn later that my bones had been nourished by the diluted discharge from the Oak Ridge H-bomb factory...
...While I did not realize it at first, when I made my first doodle of an H-bomb in the spring of 1978, I was making a rough draft of a membership card for the fraternity...
...Twenty minutes later, the ambassador was back...
...The Hawaii Air National Guard launched its alert birds over my head...
...The event, I learned later, proved the feasibility of what came to be known as the Teller-Ulam thermonuclear design principle...
...Information is power...
...Los Alamos and Albuquerque, New Mexico...
...Come again, Sir...
...They are called H-bombs — and they are made in secret...
...Once a year I watched our loadmasters practice loading thermonuclear weapons onto the C-141 cargo plane I flew...
...Just before the Tet offensive of 1968, I was on a crew rest stop in Honolulu, surfing at Waikiki...
...But the censor's pencil had struck most of what I needed to know to analyze the military half...
...My New Year's resolution for 1978 was to find out...
...I wondered whether I would have time to catch a few more waves before the H-bombs landed on Honolulu...
...The captions stop short of telling the secret, but they make it clear that the 500-acre factory turns out H-bomb components as routinely as General Motors turns out automobiles...
...The Ugandan president-for-life leaped from his limousine and began scanning the magazines heaped on the counter...
...I also visited public museums in Dayton, Ohio...
...I talked with Charles Gilbert, the deputy director of the Division of Military Applications...
...Whatever the reasons for secrecy, its 'Once I had been admitted, I proposed to pass out membership cards to everyone' the world committed to covering World War III before it happened...
...Drugstore, or newsstand, or whatever...
...you rich...
...But then, to my astonishment, a student raised his hand and gave me a straightforward explanation...
...I knew that Oak Ridge, Tennessee, ninety miles upriver from Chattanooga, was a nuclear research center, but I did not know that the major nuclear components for all the country's H-bombs were made there...
...The reason had to do with the H-bomb...
...I learned these facts from a public plant brochure I got from the Oak Ridge Operations office, but not until after I had purged myself of the thought that what went on at the plant was none of my business...
...He agreed 1 could ask any questions I wanted...
...The critics of nuclear power programs are well-armed with information...
...I collected a stack of unclassified public documents and books...
...As a novice journalist (I had written a few pieces for Flying magazine), I was inclined to follow rules rather than intuition...
...Some of my friends flew B-52s...
...he barked at the newsdealer...
...Subscribe now With the Tanzanian forces within thirty miles of Kampala and closing in fast, Idi Amin was getting desperate...
...A curious event took place in a University of Alabama dormitory in Tuscaloosa, in the winter of 1978...
...Liver-more, California, and Washington, D.C., where replicas or actual casings of nuclear weapoas are on display...
...At Emory University in Atlanta, I delved as a college freshman into the world of pure science...
...I wondered how it worked...
...And he picked up the phone again...
...I grew up with Life magazine and the Paul Harvey radio show...
...I saw the outline for a serious economic analysis of the arms race in the microcosm of Oak Ridge...
...I explained that I needed to understand the industry's product in order to understand the industry...
...He offered the opinion that now, for the first time since the Atomic Age began, people were starting to think rationally about nuclear matters...
...Now I knew what had lifted Eiugelab into the stratosphere...
...In three-and-a-half months I visited five nuclear weapon facilities by arrangement with the Department of Energy...
...Was it to mask environmental hazards...
...Its purpose was to challenge the mythology of secrecy by discussing the supposed "secret" of the H-bomb itself...
...The fraternity includes scientists and technicians in America, Russia, Britain, France, and China — thermonuclear countries...
...Petersburg, Florida, where General Electric makes electronic neutron sources and batteries...
...1 was dumbfounded for a day when I discovered them...
...Now, listen carefully, ambassador...
...But I did pick up a copy of the new Life magazine with a piece on the disco craze in Idi Amin slowly hung up...
...The show was strong on atomic power but weak on the arms race, and as I traveled from place to place, showing the slides and doing my research, I was attempting to correct the deficiency...
...Union Carbide's Y-12 Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which makes the major nuclear components for all nuclear weapons, including all the uranium and lithium-6 deuteride parts...
...In my part of the country, eastern Tennessee, where the atomic bomb was born, they used to say, "If you're so smart, why aren't you a nuclear physicist...
...But what I do have is the international edition of the Reader's Digest with a splendid article on 'The Enviable Inner Peace of the Pickled Beet,' and then I've got the current People magazine with news of Liz Taylor's marvelous new life as...
...Was it to give management an advantage over labor...
...The audience chuckled, as I knew it would...
...It was a clue to which I was to return again and again...
...Nobody seemed to know...
...The more I looked for hard facts, the more I encountered secrecy...
...The Tet offensive ended, and the nukes stayed put, but I never got them out of my mind...
...The three giant facilities there are run by the same corporate contractor, Union Carbide's Nuclear Division...
...Richard Lipez (Richard Lipez is co-author of "Grand Scam, "a novel of oil and intrigue to be published in May by Dial...
...The censor's motto, "When in doubt, cross it out," was still everywhere in evidence...
...A decade later, I managed to find an outlet for my continuing concern about nuclear weapons...
...The machines themselves were called calutrons, for the University of California cyclotrons which served as their progenitors...
...The Department of Energy had granted his request to take an official tour of its major nuclear weapon component production factories...
...If we could challenge the Public Service Company of New Hampshire over the question of a power reactor in Seabrook, we could also challenge the Pentagon over the H-bomb...
...Nuclear scientists of all countries gather regularly at international watering holes...
...Oh well," he said with a shrug...
...I would now actually get inside the buildings for the first time...
...The brochure had well over a hundred photographs of machines that perform mechanical and chemical operations with uranium-238, uranium-235, and beryllium...
...The first fruit of these efforts was an article, completed in November and published last February by The Progressive, about tritium, a little-known radioactive component of thermonuclear weapons...
...He needed assistance in covering the widely scattered facilities...
...Gosh, I'm sorry," the next newsdealer told Idi Amin, "we've never carried The Progressive, I'm sorry to say...
...Rarely larger than four-foot sections of sewer pipe, which they resemble, these devices are designed to kill millions of people and poison their land for generations...
...I spent several weeks interviewing Government officials in Washington, 1).( . and chasing down professors and students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge...
...Such impressions from childhood were strong enough to send me off to college in 1960 with intentions of majoring in physics...
...Nuclear weapon material flows were classified...
...I spent the first nine months of 1978 raising my technical competence from that of a college freshman to that of a college sophomore...
...the Savannah River Plant near Aiken, South Carolina, where DuPont makes plutonium, deuterium, and tritium and nuclear weapon components containing tritium...
...I was there to present my slide show, "Atomic Power and the Arms Race," which traces the historical connections between the military and non-military branches of the nuclear industry...
...The enormous magnets that powered the enrichment machines in World War II were wired with U.S...
...he shouted to his chauffeur...
...It was six feet high...
...Lovins thought the reason was that the generation that had built the first bomb and the first reactor was dead or had retired from public life...
...In the end, my childhood curiosity was satisfied...
...My first official interview as a freelance writer on assignment was in the old Atomic Energy Commission headquarters building in Germanlown, Maryland...
...There's an excellent piece in there on 'Skin that Glows — How to Get it, How to Keep it.' And another fascinating article in the same issue is 'What I see in Jon Voight,' by Judith Viorst...
...It is not because of any scientific or technical secrets I found...
...I found that the connections between the military and civilian halves of the nuclear industry are nowhere more explicit than at Oak Ridge...
...I wanted to avoid adding to the cannon fodder of World War III...
...Often I would be told that all my information had been previously published anyway...
...I started making notes for a magazine article about Oak Ridge and the nuclear industry, a story I have yet to write...
...But the president-for-life had already puffed back into his limo and shouted, "Find another newsstand that's open, and make it snappy...
...The date was July 24...
...What they did mind — what gave them deep offense when they discovered it — was that I proposed, once I had been admitted, to pass out membership cards to everyone...
...Oak Ridge, Tennessee...
...What that gave me was a membership card in the fraternity...
...We were not overawed, like our elders...
...In the Tuscaloosa dormitory that evening, toward the end of the show, I asked, almost casually, if anyone knew the H-bomb secret...
...The fully armed fighter-interceptors made a graceful, noisy arc westward, and I wondered if the Vietnam war had gone nuclear...
...Insiders began to accept me...
...Sorry to take so long, boss, but 1 couldn't find The Progressive...
...They are installed in land mines, missile warheads, depth charges, artillery shells, and other forms of nuclear weaponry...
...I said I wanted The Progressive, not some...
...I came upon them gradually and unexpectedly...
...In contrast, the critics of nuclear weapons don't even know where the weapons are made, how they work, how many there are, or even what they do...
...the Pinellas Plant in St...
...We never carried them anywhere, but we knew how to strap them in if we needed to...
...I now had two reasons to pin down the H-bomb secret: to understand the industry that produced H-bombs, and to understand secrecy itself...
...All we needed was information...
...Occasionally, in doing a five-G loop in a needle-nosed supersonic trainer, I would exceed the speed of sound and send a sonic boom down on the town of Muleshoe, Texas...
...I also wanted to understand the physics of thermonuclear processes so that I could independently evaluate information on the basis of plausibility...
...A judge in Wisconsin said The Progressive would show me how to make a hydrogen bomb, and I need it fasti" "Well, we've never stocked that one, actually...
...I knew that indeed it had been...
...Once I knew the "handshake," people would discuss technical matters with little hesitation...
...I wondered why none of my friends ever considered having children...
...I looked around at the scruffy collection of anti-nuclear activists that I counted myself part of and concluded that Lovins was right...
...I would look for economic insights, environmental hazards, human interest vignettes, reasons for the geographic locations of facilities, the transportation network — in short, anything that might make a story...
...In some parts of the country children say, "If you're so smart, why aren't Howard Morland is a free-lance writer specializing in nuclear weapons and energy issues...
...Did you say drugstore, sir...
...It gave me a sense of power...
...I toured the Mound Facility in Dayton, Ohio, where Monsanto Corporation makes detonators and plutonium-238 heat sources...
...I told the story as simply and accurately as I could — and I put it in plain English...
...And then there's "You imbecile...
...In February 1978, a week or two after I first heard the secret in Alabama, I visited Oak Ridge and discovered, almost by accident, the sprawling H-bomb factory where the secret is translated into military hardware...
...Their looks told me that they knew I was not the first...
...Patch me through to our embassy in Washington...
...It was an extraordinary stroke of luck for me...
...Each time I showed it and asked questions I got hints about how to change it...
...Was it to prevent meaningful price regulation in a monopoly market...
...The reasons for secrecy were plain enough during World War II, when American scientists submitted to military censorfunction was to nurture and protect the industry...
...The Progressive...
...During the Vietnam war I hauled soldiers from Southern California to Vietnam in Air Force cargo planes — and hauled their bodies back in aluminum boxes...
...It is a fraternity of people who are able to claim superior insight into nuclear matters by virtue of possessing accurate knowledge...
...Y-12 employed an electromagnetic uranium enrichment technique developed by Edwin O. Lawrence of Berkeley, California, inventor of the cyclotron...
...Flying in the rarefied atmosphere over the Texas panhandle, I would sometimes imagine myself to be a point-mass, as in classical physics, subject only to the impartial forces of kinematics, the laws of motion...
...It still bears the World War II code name, Y-12...
...Treasury silver...
...They explained electricity, magnetism, heat, and light all at once...
...H-bombs were very real to me...
...But would the March Redbook help...
...My moral concerns were now based on factual information, and I began to hope that informed people might undo the damage the experts had done...
...As a private citizen, not as a journalist, 1 later visited the Rocky Flats Plant in Denver, Colorado, operated by Rockwell International, which fabricates plutonium-239 components and does assembly work on fission "triggers" for H-bombs...
...It's got Ranger Rick's annual contest winners, plus 'Millie the Mallard Takes a Bath' and...
...The H-bomb 'secret' Learning it is easy, once you know the handshake Howard Norland Every three hours of every working day America produces a device with the explosive power of many trainloads of TNT...
...I thought of submitting the story to The Progressive because it seemed to me to be one of the few journals in ship to keep Hitler from getting the Bomb...
...There is no visitor center or any sign explaining the plant's function...
...The rest of us were not obliged to perpetuate their mistakes...
...I would later find a third reason...
...What's that you say you're after...
...How they are made is also a secret, a secret that has intrigued me since childhood...
...Last June, quite by chance, I made contact with Sam Day, associate editor of The Progressive, who was then pursuing the same line of inquiry...
...It probably includes people in every other country in the world where nuclear technology is studied and used...
...There are none...
...Why did the Government react so forcefully to my story...
...Y-12 makes bombs, the Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant enriches uranium for nuclear power plants, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory does basic chemical research for nuclear weapons and nuclear power...
...I thought someone there might be interested in a story on Oak Ridge...
...Rule number one is to have two sources and check the facts...
...and the Kansas City plant in Kansas City, Missouri, operated by Bendix Corporation, which makes non-nuclear mechanical parts, bomb casings, and electronic components...
...Sam Day introduced me to the wealth of material in Congressional hearing records and other public sources...
...I took the jet pilot course and graduated with a set of wings...
...It lies in a valley by itself near the center of the ninety-two-square-mile tract of land appropriated by the Manhattan Project during World War II...
...The Commerce Department had put out maps of nuclear material flows, but only for the nuclear power industry...
...I want you to pick up a copy of The Progressive, and then I want you to read very slowly — so that I can copy it down — an article on how I can...
...Then I went to work on my second article...
...I was a fifth-grade student in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1952 when the first American H-bomb lifted the Pacific island of Elugelab into the stratosphere and reduced it to radioactive fallout...
...Other people's children could die in a nuclear holocaust, but not mine...
...I said The Progressive, where is it...
...Was it the war...
...Was it to prevent informed public discussion by intimidating critics, or to justify a system of security clearances and background investigations which excludes potential dissenters from decision making...
...I had known the profound aesthetic appeal of Newton's laws of motion and of Einstein's extension of those laws into relativistic phenomena, but I was particularly struck by the grace of Clerk Maxwell's four equations of electromagnetism...
...They told me that the H-bomb was for our protection, but the message I got was that from now on my generation and I would have to live with the prospect of nuclear annihilation, thanks to this recent American invention...
...he snapped into the mouthpiece...
...The H-bomb worked...
...At first my drawings got worse, but in the process of showing them I picked up words, key phrases, and design fragments that were correct...
...But by then President Amin was back in his limousine and rapidly dialing his radiophone...
...So was a great deal more about the nuclear weapons industry...
...I want the ambassador on the line and I want him nowV After a minute of clicks and beeps the Ugandan ambassador was there, ready for his instructions...
...Where's The Progressive...
...But today's secrecy seemed to have a life of its own...
...Take me to the nearest newsstand...
...It was to be an analysis of the role of secrecy in the nuclear weapons program...
...The Progressive's intentions to publish the H-bomb secret amounted to a threat to flood the market with their currency — the currency of secrecy...
...I want you to run down to the drugstore...
...I also learned, from the same brochure, that the primary role of the Y-12 plant today is still the production of nuclear weapon components...
...The Y-12 plant produced most of the 125 pounds or so of uranium-235 that transformed human beings into permanent shadows on granite paving stones in Hiroshima...
...Ironically, one of the first pieces of information I stumbled across in my quest for the "H-bomb secret," as I called it, was the secret itself...
...The thousands who know the correct design concept for thermonuclear weapons form a fraternity...
...For me the reason was the Bomb...
...Initially, I pursued a number of blind alleys in my quest for the proper thermonuclear weapon design concept...
...I talked to scores of people — people who knew the H-bomb secret, people who thought they knew it, and people who had never thought about the subject...
...If I can't rely on The Progressive, there's always Libya...
...Or, say, how about Ranger Rick's Magazine...
...The thought was terrifying and intriguing...
...I need a copy of The Progressive and I need it now...
...It was because I discovered the passwords...
...Later I joined the Air Force with the idea of going into commercial aviation or astronautics...
...But I subsequently lost interest in physics...
...In my spare time I surfed...
...Quick...
...Amory Lovins, the pro-solar physicist, was speaking in Putney, Vermont, to a meeting of the Clamshell Alliance, an anti-nuclear group to which I had gravitated after the war...
...The members of the fraternity did not seem to mind that I lacked the vestments of Government clearance...
Vol. 43 • May 1979 • No. 5
