The Secret Sharer

...They had apparently been trying to use a fission bomb to directly ignite one end of a cylinder of fusion fuel, and they couldn't get it to work...

...He was trying to minimize the Government's embarrassment in losing the case...

...For the general public, puncturing the secrecy mystique was an exercise in reality therapy...

...A reader attempting to gain a general understanding of H-bomb design would not have been seriously misled by my article...

...It is probably not by chance that the nuclear club ceased to expand during the period in which nuclear secrets ceased to be secret...

...What we do with the knowledge may be the key to our survival...

...Today, as America, more aroused than ever before, begins the unraveling of the more fundamental secret, the words with which I closed my story five years ago express the continuing urgency of our need to know about the H-bomb: "Whether it be the details of a multimillion- dollar plutonium production expansion program or the principles and procedures by which nature's most explosive force is being packaged in our midst, we have less to fear from knowing than from not knowing...

...I was surprised to learn, months after the Government had taken me and The Progressive to court in what came to be a historic test of our First Amendment rights, that my article contained a fundamental error in its description of the x-rays' function...

...Since the essential knowledge has become public, nobody with any pretensions to be considered a serious scientist finds professional fulfillment in proving that he can design a bomb as competently as the Americans...

...Perhaps it helped in a small way to bring America out of the "psychic numbness" which for a generation had protected the H-bomb from serious public examination...

...Nuclear weapons design has been stripped of its mystique, and there is no longer any scientific glory attached to it...

...Let me say, parenthetically, for the benefit of those who may be new to this issue, that there never was any danger of the article helping someone build an Hbomb...

...He said, "The piece contains some substantial ideas on building an H-bomb, but also a lot of nonsense...

...Since 1979, anyone who wanted to know how hydrogen bombs work has been able to refer to Howard Morland's article in the November 1979 issue of The Progressive," Dyson wrote recently in The New Yorker...

...Even in scientifically backward countries, young people of talent know that nuclear weapons have ceased to be a scientific challenge...

...I discovered my error simply by reading and puzzling over the technical arguments that had been submitted in closed chambers by attorneys for both sides in the H-bomb case and then "declassified" by the Department of Energy...

...The error, simply stated, was my assertion that x-ray beams from the Hbomb's fission trigger are the force that directly compresses the fusion fuel, thereby initiating the thermonuclear fusion reaction...

...When I completed my research in the winter of 1979, I felt I had gone as far as a journalist could go in elucidating a field of knowledge—nuclear weapons design— which, according to law, only a small coterie of experts sworn to secrecy may properly enter...

...One scientist who initially accepted the Government's case and later changed his mind is Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson...

...It was this simple concept, so obvious once you think of it, that had eluded the scientists at Los Alamos until 1951...

...Over the years, a rather silly notion had arisen that the separated-stages idea, which did work, was too complicated for foreign scientists to think of on their own, and that all references to it should, therefore, remain classified forever...

...X-rays from the exploding fission stage are used to compress and then to ignite the nearby fusion stage...

...If telling secrets has dampened scientific rivalries which drive the nuclear arms race, the exercise has also strengthened the hand of those who would challenge nuclear weapons policies in the court of public opinion...

...It has done this by legitimating the raising of tough policy questions based on careful technical analysis...

...It helped the public see and hear and smell the Bomb a little better...

...Howard Morland wrote "The H-bomb Secret, " which appeared in the November 1979 issue of The Progressive...

...I duly corrected the x-ray story and other errors in a page of "errata" in the December 1979 issue of The Progressive, a month after the original article had been published in full, unaltered...

...There will be no more firstrate scientists driving the nuclear arms race with their rivalries...

...But there was enough wrong with it to enable Cornell physicist Hans Bethe to belittle the article in a Newsweek report immediately after the Government had abandoned all attempts to suppress publication...

...As the author of "The H-bomb Secret," I had spent six months combing libraries, interviewing scientists and technicians, and touring Department of Energy laboratories and factories in order to demystify nuclear weapons...

...Even today, the sight of a pile of disposable coffee cups is enough to remind me of that disturbing connection...

...Hydrogen bombs employ the principle of thermonuclear fusion, which is far more difficult and costly to achieve in a weapon than the nuclear fission of an atomic bomb...

...But, as one not legally authorized to know what the Government calls "secret restricted data," I could not be certain about the accuracy of my article—nor could the editors of The Progressive, who had commissioned it—until the Government itself confirmed the facts (at an extraordinary meeting in the offices of the magazine's attorneys) in the very act of trying to suppress them...

...Knowing how may be the key to asking why...

...It may have emboldened physicians to look more closely at the medical effects, peace activists to ferret out more assiduously the office buildings and factories and rail lines that tie the H-bomb into America's social fabric, church leaders to raise the moral D A V I D SUTER issue more insistently...

...Bethe had been the Government censors' star technical witness in the case against us...

...Paradoxically, the Government itself, determined to assert its role as keeper of the secrets, had unwittingly taught me and others the rest of the secrets of the H-bomb...

...He is with the Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy in Washington, D.C...

...He didn't seem to think it mattered whether you knew about the styrofoam...

...It turned out that styrofoam, the purest expression of America's throw-away culture, was one of the keys to the secret of the doomsday weapon...

...Five years ago I wrote, in the article the Government suppressed for almost seven months: "The secret of how a hydrogen bomb is made protects a more fundamental 'secret': the mechanism by which the resources of the most powerful nation on Earth have been marshaled for global catastrophe...

...What the Government confirmed was my description of the H-bomb as a twostage device with the fission "trigger," the first stage, physically separated from the fusion, or hydrogen, stage...

...Did publication of "The H-bomb Secret" open the door to proliferation of nuclear weapons, as the Government argued so strenuously that it would...

...I might have been willing to leave well enough alone except for this attempt by Bethe to remystify the H-bomb and reassert the bomb scientists' prerogative to play "I've got a secret...

...I had overlooked an intermediate stage: The x-rays cause a dense polystyrene- type foam to heat and explode, and the force of expanding matter compresses the thermonuclear fuel, along with a second piece of fissile material imbedded inside it...

...Development of a hydrogen bomb, unlike a fission bomb, would be beyond the capability of all but the most technically advanced governments...

...The Secret Sharer It turned out that styrofoam was one of the keys BY HOWARD MORLAND Five years ago, the Government of the United States, in an unprecedented act, secured a court order suppressing publication of a magazine article it said had penetrated the secret of the hydrogen bomb...