Beyond the H-bomb case
Bagdikian, Ben H.
BOOKS Beyond the H-bomb case Ben H. Bagdikian BORN SECRET: THE H-BOMB, THE PROGRESSIVE CASE, AND NATIONAL SECURITY by Alexander DeVolpi, Gerald E. Marsh, Theodore A. Postal, and George S....
...They are not sure they would have raised these issues in the way the magazine did...
...Government, did not produce the desired result, the Government dropped its case...
...And they can do the same to us if we strike first, and, underneath all the flummery produced for the media, we know that, too...
...The Secret That Exploded is an intensely personal story...
...the majority of the key individual promoters of the arms race derive a very large part of their self-esteem from their participation in what they cThe Secret That Exploded' Howard Morland's account of his role in The Progressive's H-Bomb case is published this month as The Secret That Exploded (Random House...
...The ostensible purpose of this law and of Government censorship of The Progressive is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, an eminently sane goal...
...But twenty-five years later a panel of leading atomic scientists reviewing the documents the Rosenbergs were charged with passing to the Russians declared the documents "essentially worthless...
...Then why the endless rush to create ever more permutations of nuclear weapons that will not change this fundamental truth...
...We start from the position that policy decisions made in secret have a greater chance of being wrong than if they are made in the light of public scrutiny...
...The Rosenbergs were executed because, as the Government said and the sentencing judge agreed, they "gave the secret of the bomb to the Russians," by now a familiar refrain...
...If taken literally, which is the way it is taken when the authorities choose, as they did in this case, it was a crime, for example, to report much of the news from the Three Mile Island accident...
...Among his books are "The Information Machines" and "The Effete Conspiracy...
...When all these maneuvers, more appropriate to the regime of a banana republic than to the U.S...
...The momentum of endless growth of nuclear weaponry coupled with secrecy has distorted the democratic process, including justice...
...Intelligence," they say darkly, "is perhaps a lethal mutation...
...The other element is that unlike other Government secrecy provisions, this one prohibits public discussion of "all data concerning" these nuclear matters unless the Government issues item-by-item approval ahead of time...
...We now live with the precedent of successful prior restraint of a citizen's own ideas and of a magazine...
...Section 2014(y) of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 forbids publication of "all data concerning (1) design, manufacture, or utilization of atomic weapons...
...But as The Progressive had hoped, it raised the issue of Ben H. Bagdikian, journalist and civil libertarian, is a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley...
...320 pp...
...But they are not optimistic...
...The authors quote Herbert York about this large, elite community: "They derive either their incomes, their profits, or their consultant fees from it...
...Department of Energy didn't like...
...They have produced a clear and extensive record of the case, but they have done much more than that...
...Note the phrase, "all data concerning...
...Government manipulation of information on the subject most threatening to civilization, nuclear armaments...
...But the goal cannot be achieved if the public does not have a free flow of relevant information in order to have truly informed consent for-public policies that will decrease the nuclear threat...
...Is democracy viable, is civilized survival possible in a nuclear world...
...But much more important than money as a motivating force are the individuals' own psychic and spiritual needs...
...Government...
...Born Secret succeeds in putting the convolutions of nuclear policy into a simple, sane context: There is no defense...
...They would stop exporting bomb materials and technology...
...They think no one was a winner in the case...
...BOOKS Beyond the H-bomb case Ben H. Bagdikian BORN SECRET: THE H-BOMB, THE PROGRESSIVE CASE, AND NATIONAL SECURITY by Alexander DeVolpi, Gerald E. Marsh, Theodore A. Postal, and George S. Stanford Pergamon Press...
...Crucial ideas came from encyclopedias available all over the world...
...Constitution, and had careened through a series of farcical orders forbidding newspapers and members of Congress to publish citizens' letters on the case...
...Morland's focus in The Secret That Exploded is his personal role in tracking down scientific information through the stages of writing and rewriting, his involvement in the legal case, his exposure to television and media coverage, and the aftermath of publication of his article...
...Morland emerges as a vagabond who lives off his friends and their refrigerators...
...Readers are likely to encounter more details than they care to know...
...The article purported to show how a hydrogen bomb works...
...They note, sensibly, that the Government was in an hour-by-hour rush to get The Progressive censored by the.court to prevent immediate, grave, and irreparable harm to the country by encouraging proliferation of H-bombs, but then ask, "What has the Government been doing for the past third of a century to curtail proliferation effectively...
...The human race has been so clever that it has finally produced mechanisms so alien and destructive to civilization that so far it has been beyond the capacity of homo sapiens to control their own deadly machines...
...history...
...Compelling issues remain...
...Clement in the year 95, what is not permitted is forbidden...
...In the process they have produced a scientifically and socially useful document on the issue of survival in a world of uncontrolled nuclear proliferation...
...The authors would not try to conceal ideas that any skilled person can deduce from known natural laws, but they would keep the "trade secrets" of exotic and precise design and engineering details of manufacture and assembly of the bombs (which The Progressive did not print...
...Three of the most significant decisions in world history were made in closed chambers: to undertake the development of the atomic bomb, to use the bomb on Japan, and to develop the hydrogen bomb...
...These ideas, regardless of their origin, are "classified at birth," or "born secret...
...District Court in Milwaukee issued orders forbidding The Progressive magazine to publish an article the U.S...
...Before the six-month censorship had ended, the Government had convinced the court to hear its most important testimony without the defendants being present, which violates the Sixth Amendment of the U.S...
...Authors Alexander DeVolpi, Gerald E. Marsh, Theodore Postol, and George S. Stanford are physicists at the Argonne National Laboratory and cooperated with The Progressive in its defense...
...Some secrecy is merely compulsively idiotic: When Soviets declassify some of their fusion research to the world, as soon as it reaches the United States we classify it...
...17.50...
...288 pp...
...And why are the major nations committed to pouring their wealth and diminishing resources into deadly holes in the ground instead of into productive society...
...2) the production of special nuclear materials...
...The answer, stimulated by The Progressive and articulated with clarity and thoughtfulness by the authors of Born Secret, is that most Americans do not appreciate to what extent their authority figures and a major part of their industrial, governmental, and intellectual society have become integral parts of nuclear enlargement...
...They would have the country do what it has refused to do, enter into a comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty, since any violation is automatically detected from afar and would discourage new developments...
...Like the Apostolic Constitutions of St...
...Now and in any foreseeable future, we can kill Soviet society with a retaliation no matter what their best weapons may do if they strike first, and they know that...
...For the first time in our history, certain ideas, concepts, and speculations may not be discussed publicly even if these ideas are those of an ordinary citizen...
...The case caused belated examination of an extraordinary law that for a generation had lain almost unnoticed...
...bombing of Cambodia was kept from the American people (again, to prevent "giving away secrets" to an enemy) but of course the Cambodians, the Russians, the Chinese, and the Vietnamese knew they were being bombed...
...Two elements make this law astounding within American democracy...
...The authors do not agree with everything The Progressive did, and they are n6t opposed to all secrecy...
...It was a new censorship phenomenon in U.S...
...They would stop making more bombs (instead of the 10,000 more on order...
...They think some of the Morland article missed some points...
...14.95...
...The magazine was censored for six months and burdened with $250,000 in court costs...
...The authors of Born Secret: The H-Bomb, The Progressive Case, and National Security address themselves to whether these two goals—secrecy and censorship to contain the most vital information, and an informed public to create a survival policy—are incompatible...
...They do not address the merits of the decision by Franklin Roosevelt to develop the atomic bomb but they do address the decision to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which they believe was unnecessary to end the Pacific war quickly...
...He is eloquent in his concern for nuclear disarmament and the need to arouse citizens to the dangers of nuclear war...
...The authors make a convincing case that every assumed benefit of secrecy must be balanced against the loss of informed response by people outside official secret circles, and against the power that secrecy gives of releasing only that information that gives the illusion of supporting people and policies in power at any given moment...
...Apparently Morland kept a careful log of his daily activities...
...DeVolpi, Marsh, Postol, and Stanford have recommendations, mostly of a familiar kind (reform of classification, dropping "born secret," reduction of the military-industrial complex, more informed Congressional oversight...
...Edward Teller and Hans Bethe could write encyclopedia articles used by Howard Morland, author of The Progressive article, but only Morland and The Progressive provoked official retribution...
...Not only is much non-secret material stamped "secret" but release of secret material is punished selectively...
...or (3) the use of special nuclear material in the production of energy...
...They think the Government was unintelligent in bringing the case, quite aside from the civil libertarian affront, because the Government announced to the world that The Progressive's writer Howard Morland was barking up the right tree (even though it's a tree others have successfully climbed without The Progressive and without the U.S...
...And the Government dropped the case before its "born secret" doctrine could be adjudicated by an appeals court...
...M.S...
...And they make a convincing case that the decision to escalate from atomic to hydrogen bombs was made not only in secret but without an appreciation that it would decrease, not increase, the security of the United States...
...During the Vietnam war the U.S...
...believe to be an essential—even a holy—cause...
...On March 9,1979, the U.S...
...An inexperienced but enterprising investigative reporter with an immense curiosity about nuclear technology, Morland was a veteran of the anti-nuclear movement when The Progressive encouraged him to research and write the article that became the subject of a major First Amendment case...
...It was drawn from open literature and from interviews with scientists who had no access to classified bomb data...
Vol. 45 • June 1991 • No. 7
