ON SCIENCE AND SECRECY

...This doesn't mean that Idi Amin will soon be able to build his own bomb, even if he gets to see a copy of Howard Morland's article...

...The arms budget provides these corporations guaranteed cost-plus contracts, often without even the semblance of competitive bidding...

...As we all know, the sun had been moved to the center of our solar John Buell is an associate editor of The Progressive...

...These elites are concerned about declining rates of real growth which exacerbate social tensions, about lower corporate profits, and about the failure of the military budget to keep pace with increases in Gross National Product...

...If H-bomb proliferation can be successfully portrayed as a problem of keeping a "secret," Government elites can maintain the illusion that merely guarding this secret will keep us secure...

...These changes in scientific theory were not obvious and did not come from mere observation...

...Any nuclear physicist trained in the accepted principles of quantum mechanics, relativity, and nuclear structure could have filled out the puzzle much more swiftly and in much greater technical detail...

...By the time of Newton, several of the self-evident basic assumptions had undergone a radical alteration...

...That economic elites feel especially threatened by political dissent has been clear at least since the publication of the Trilateral Commission's Crisis of Democracy report in 1975...

...This may explain why, despite the Government's rhetoric in court, it waited weeks before it asked any member of our staff who else might have seen the Morland manuscript before we were restrained from publishing it...

...Morland's article explains the reasons for testing, so that citizens can assess the validity of the weapons builders' claims...

...security really isn't endangered by the Morland article, what possible motive could the Government have in its gargantuan effort to suppress the piece...

...What Howard Morland did in his suppressed article for The Progressive was little more than a journalistic recapitulation of the puzzle-solving exercises in which a whole generation of nuclear physicists has already successfully engaged...

...Profound rethinking of basic concepts had to occur, and such rethinking is rare in the history of science...

...Once these basic principles had been laid out, any nation could soon accumulate the theoretical insights needed to build a hydrogen bomb...

...Fearing the kind of grass-roots resistance to elite aims that characterized the 1960s, the Trilateral leaders argue for "a moderation of democracy" in the interests of "governability...

...That way they can head off the notion that our only real security lies in changing those political and economic policies that make bombs possible...

...I suggested to my fellow editors that we publish the expurgated version and hold a contest among our readers to "fill in the dotted lines...

...Though we don't intend to hold such a contest, the incident does prompt a few reflections on scientific progress...

...To this end, they would like to keep workers' wages down, cut spending for social programs, and open the military spigot more widely...

...And they can block the needed political and economic changes that will not be made unless the United States and the four other members of the thermonuclear club are willing to sacrifice their own obsession with the nuclear arms race...

...But they have never explained why, insisting that the information is "classified...

...The implications of such secrecy pose a far more serious long-run threat to our security than could a full discussion of the issues and principles involved...

...Today, concern about secrets can be used to generate support for an Official Secrets Act — some proposals for which are now in Congress — and to push other measures to repress dissent...

...Our biggest military contractors include such leading members of the Fortune Five Hundred as General Motors, American Telephone and Telegraph, Westinghouse, and General Electric...

...In any era, scientists work from a small set of fundamental, self-evident assumptions...

...Their restricted contact with present scientific practice and its limitations makes it more difficult for them to contribute to ordinary scientific endeavors, or even to laying the groundwork for those rarer scientific revolutions...

...Small deviations in the expected orbits of certain planets were explained for many years not by a rethinking of the basic concepts of Newtonian mechanics but by meticulous search for new planets...

...Once the breakthroughs in any science are made, a series of puzzles are solved and refinements are made as part of the normal process of scientific work...

...REFLECTIONS On science and secrecy lohn Buell Four days after the Government restrained The Progressive from publishing Howard Morland's article on hydrogen bomb secrecy, I was sitting with two other editors of the magazine reading a censored version of the manuscript — a version the Government had told us we could publish...

...The Department of Energy had deleted a sentence or two here and there...

...They are eager to get corporate capitalism moving again...

...The deleted terms, which I am not allowed to mention in this article, are all terms with which I am familiar, though I have had only a few college-level physics courses...

...Most practicing scientists work within the confines of a widely accepted paradigm: They spend their time solving a small set of problems suggested by the paradigm...

...Science, we have been told in such influential works as Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, progresses in a series of quantum leaps...

...system, but linear motion had also replaced circular motion — a philosophical change so difficult that even as prescient a scientist as Galileo had been unable to make the leap...

...in some cases only a word or two had been removed...

...I suspect most Government officials and scientists are fully aware of this fact...

...The myth that there are fundamental secrets helps sustain the power of political and economic elites in this country...

...The puzzle-solvers are intelligent people, but absorption in the paradigm and persistence are generally rewarded...

...To build an H-bomb, Amin would need an elaborate, sophisticated, and costly technological and economic infrastructure — one that would have to include the nuclear reactors which the United States has been eager to export...

...Weapons builders have argued for years, for example, against a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty on grounds that continued underground testing is essential to "national THE MADISON PRESS CCNNECTION security...

...Yet if U.S...

...Such fatalism shields from criticism the economic and military elites which have a huge stake in the arms race...

...Yet, paradoxically, secrecy has some contradictory implications even for elites...

...Any potential builder of bombs has this information, but the myth of secrecy and expertise fosters a passive or fatalistic attitude among citizens who might otherwise confront the Government with troublesome questions...

...Ptolemaic astronomy, for example, assumed the "naturalness" of circular motion and an earth-centered universe: The observed motions of the stars and planets were explained through various configurations of circular orbits...

...Since the beginning of the nuclear age, Government scientists and military leaders have fostered the notion that nuclear policy must be reserved to experts because 1) they alone are in possession of these abstruse mysteries, and 2) those who have been given "national security clearance" are the only ones who can be trusted not to give the secrets to our enemies...

...The basic breakthroughs in the nuclear weapons field are several decades old, and were made by an international community of scientists — Einstein, Bohr, Planck, and Fermi, among others...

...The effect of the secrecy mystique — the notion that there are vital decisions which only a select few can and must make — is to keep out of the public domain information that is indispensable to the formation of intelligent public policy...

...Defining the issue in terms of secrecy has thus allowed the Government to engage in continuous surveillance and repression of dissident groups which might give the "secret" away...

...Those outside the scientific establishment are prevented from elaborating further the puzzles that still remain...