The H Bomb Case

Initial Public Support for the Decision

When the mass media broke the story portraying Morland’s H-bomb article as a magazine’s attempt to publish a recipe for anyone “who might like to build a hydrogen bomb in his garage,”1 many citizens from around the country supported Judge Warren’s decision. Consider a few examples:

Cristi Currie of West Bend:2 “Unbelievable!….I am all for freedom of the press, but not for possible world destruction, which your article will expedite. Haven’t we learned anything from history? There have always been the Hitlers of this world, who will use such tools to meet the ends of their crazy, power-hungry, and irrational goals. Thanks to you, you’ve helped that possibility along….You fight for freedom but at the same time limit my freedom from fear of World War III. Congratulations. I feel sadder and more depressed now than I ever have.”

Michael Ehlers of Boulder, Colorado:3 “What in the name of God ever possessed you to print information on how to manufacture a thermonuclear bomb? Were you worried that only a handful of nations had them? Did you want all future wars to be waged on equal footing? Are you in a hurry to see someone drop The Big One? I hope the government wins its case, as the First Amendment was surely never meant to cover irresponsibility of this kind.”

San Francisco Chronicle:4 “Some are making this out to be a free press issue. But doesn’t it come down to this, that a handy guide to building your own H-bomb is just too dangerous to allow to be passed out to every kid on the block, especially to heads of state like Idi Amin and his booster, Yassir Arafat?…That part of the press which is lamenting the notion of a court’s daring to exercise ‘prior restraint’ to stop this H-bomb article should ask itself whether there are not some interests and subjects calling for a publisher’s own prior self-restraint.”

Ann McLin of New Orleans, Louisiana:5 “You call this a victory over Federal censors. I call it irresponsible journalism. In all likelihood you have given birth to some hotshot backyard bomber and we’ll all be destroyed.”

Twin FallsTimes-News (Idaho):6 Even though they may not have sinned constitutionally, they have sinned morally….The magazine has acted irresponsibly—going too far in taking advantage of its First Amendment rights—and, therefore, banning such an article should not be construed as a violation of that right.

Mary Williams of Grand Rapids, Michigan:7 You may think you have the right to print articles about the H-bomb, how to put one together, etc., but you do not have the right to do so. I ask you to apologize to Almighty God about this sin and that you become Christian. If you don’t stop publishing about the H-bomb, or any other bomb, you can face arrest. If you are a member of the Communist Party, there is a law against this party since June 23, 1978.

Fred Morse of Austin, Texas:8 There are many good newsmen in the country and there are also the kind that would do anything to get a story—even to the extent of betraying their own country. Are you really so well informed that you are positive your additional hydrogen bomb disclosure won’t aid a foreign country? Also, have you set yourself up as self-appointed censor or “uncensor” in opposition to what our government leadership recommends? Your kind disgusts me and also scares the hell out of me.

Alternatively, some people worried that the government would win any appeal and we would have a third and much more far-reaching legal precedent supporting prior restraint of the press since Warren allowed restraint of material that only might (not would) cause “grave, direct, immediate, and irreparable harm” to national security. Consider a few examples:

Bob Griss of Madison, Wisconsin:9 “I am concerned that the attention which The Progressive has suddenly captured may be used to justify more secrecy rather than to examine critically the obstacles to nuclear disarmament…”

Dayton Daily News:10 The First Amendment gives Americans the right to say and publish just about anything they please, but it has limits. One of them is the traditional prohibition of yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. Printing information about how to build a hydrogen bomb falls into that category with a vengeance.

AlbuquerqueTribune:11 The best thing the magazine can do is to kill its H-bomb article and not pursue a lawsuit that will chip away at the First Amendment. Acting in a way to favor nuclear proliferation and to limit press freedom is a most strange in a publication that professes the liberal creed.

Editor and Publisher:12 There is an old lawyer’s adage that ‘bad cases make bad law,’ and we feel this is one of those cases. No matter how right the author and his editors are in asserting all the information is in the public domain, we believe the highest court probably supported by public opinion will sustain the Atomic Energy Act and we feel the press and the public will be the losers.

Washington Post:13 As a free press-versus-Government contest, this, as far as we can tell, is John Mitchell’s dream case—the one the Nixon Administration was never lucky enough to get: a real First Amendment loser.

James Kilpatrick:14 [T]here is every reason to believe that all of the [Supreme Court] justices, save possibly Brennan, would side with the government in favor of suppression [of Morland’s article]….Recent months have seen some dismaying decisions in this whole area of the courts and the press. Judges are imposing gag orders in criminal trials. The Supreme Court…increasingly inhibits our power to gather information…The Progressive is making it worse.

These objections are interesting in part because none of these people had actually read the H-Bomb article since it was unpublished and being held in camera (in secret) when these letters were written. In fact, the reactions are based entirely on the information the government allowed to be public and the media’s erroneous portrayal of the article as a“how-to manual.” Some people never could get over that sound-byte—Judge Warren, for example, sixteen years later still thought of the article as a “recipe for a hydrogen bomb” even though he himself in his final judicial opinion noted that it was not.15

On the whole, newspaper responses fell into three main categories: those who supported the government,16 (2) those who took a wait-and-see approach until the facts emerged,17 and (3) those who supported The Progressive.18 What the public did not know, but the government did know, was that Morland’s article was not a how-to manual,19 that its technical information was in the public domain,20 that another magazine had already published in March 1979 an article explaining the same information and defying the government to prosecute it,21 that Morland’s design had a flaw in it that made it useless to anyone attempting to build an actual H-bomb,22 and that the biggest threat to nuclear proliferation (spread of fissile material) was increased through the carter administration’s own decision to sell more uranium material to India, which India then reprocessed into weapons-grade plutonium.23 Even the Federal Bureau of Investigation concluded that the government had no case against The Progressive and refused to comply with Justice Department demands that it go after Knoll, Morland, Day, Hansen and others for violating the Atomic Energy Act.24 Believing Morland’s information was indeed public domain and that its cause was worthy, The Progressive undertook a campaign to win public opinion and overturn Judge Warren’s decision.

Notes

1 Quoting David Brinkley, World News Tonight, reprinted in Leuders, p. 157.

2 Reprinted in The Progressive (Nov 1979), pp. 41-2.

3 Reprinted in The Progressive (May 1979), p. 47.

4 Reprinted in The Progressive (May 1979), p. 45

5 Reprinted in The Progressive (Nov 1979), p. 43.

6 Reprinted in The Progressive (May 1979), p. 46.

7 Reprinted in The Progressive (Nov 1979), p. 41.

8 Reprinted in The Progressive (Nov 1979), p. 43.

9 Reprinted in The Progressive (May 1979), p. 48.

10 Mar. 13, 1979.

11 Reprinted in The Progressive (May 1979), p. 45.

12 Reprinted in The Progressive (May 1979), p. 46.

13 Mar. 11, 1979. However, in its Mar. 28, 1979 editorial, the Post qualified their doubts about the success of the case with this thought: “Our own view is that Judge Warren’s order is unconstitutional. The proper procedure would have been for the government to permit The Progressive to print the article, if it chose to do so, and to face the consequences of violating the Atomic Energy Act. That was the way those who wrote the First Amendment intended it to be understood—no prior restraint, but subsequent punishment for illegal acts.” See also its editorial, June 19, 1979.

14 Kilpatrick, a nationally syndicated news columnist, Milwaukee Journal, March 15, 1979.

15 See Leuders, p. 198.

16 Examples include: Denver Rocky Mountain News, 3-30-79; Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 3-20-79; Los Angeles Times, 3-13-79; The Seattle Times, 3-28-79; Buffalo Evening News, 3-28-79. Only the Buffalo paper seriously modified its views by the time the case was dropped six months later, see its editorial, 10-18-79.

17 Examples include: Virginian-Pilot, 3-28-79; The Providence Journal, 3-31-79; The Boston Globe, 4-1-79; and Christian Science Monitor, 3-28-79. Only the Providence newspaper seriously modified its views by the time the case was dropped six months later, see its editorial 10-19-79.

18 Examples include: Des Moines Register, 3-28-79; Akron Beacon Journal, 3-24-79; Burlington ( Vermont) Free Press, 3-30-79; The Salt Lake Tribune, 3-19-79; Chattanooga Times, 3-29-79, and the Milwaukee Journal, 3-28-79. By March 30, The Progressive had compiled a list of supporters including but not limited to The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Ms. Magazine, Scientific American, The New Republic, Mother Jones, Politics Today, and Inquiry.

19 For example, DOE weapons chief Gilbert himself told Morland during their July 14, 1878 interview prior to his touring the DOE weapons facilities that, “There is more to building an H-bomb than merely knowing how. Even an H-bomb blueprint by itself would not be very useful, a sizeable technological base was required.” Leuders, p. 127. Morland’s article is far short of a blueprint (read it for yourself), and describes how an H-bomb works, not how to build one.

20 Attorneys for The Progressive filed affidavits showing the “secret” technical information appearing in, for example, textbooks and encyclopedias as well as declassified U.S. and Soviet government documents. See Knoll note below. Jonathan Entin reports “at least two other periodicals…published detailed articles with diagrams on how to build an atomic bomb without encountering any government effort to suppress publication or even to punish them after the fact” and that “students at Princeton and M.I.T. have been widely reported to have designed workable atomic bombs based upon unclassified materials.” Entin, footnote 54. Howard Morland relates that even before he met up with Knoll and Day a student at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa revealed the “secret” to him at the close of one of his slide-show presentations. The government attributed this to “security foul-ups” and “improperly declassified” documents. See Bell, p. 135 and Martin, p. 680. Hugh DeWitt pointed out that all three of the key concepts the government claimed were the central issue although classified were not at all secret. The concept of separate stages was contained in Hans Bethe’s 1967 Merit Student Encyclopedia article and Edward Teller’s 1970 encyclopedia article (both Bethe and Teller, the two men most responsible for the development of the H-bomb, claimed to have no idea how their articles came to contain classified diagrams! See, e.g., Teller, “Letter to Rep. Paul McCloskey, Jr.” dated 5/29/79). Radiation implosion was discussed in a series of public forums across the United States by a SOVIET (!) scientist, L.I. Rudakov (the Soviets did not consider anything in his talks secret and even published his work in a standard physics journal, J.E.T.P. Letters 24, 206 (Aug. 20, 1976), and were published in Science magazine in 1976. And the concept of compression is taught to all physics and chemistry undergraduate students. See DeWitt, “Nuclear Secrecy, the Atomic Energy Act, and Open Scientific Concepts,” a paper presented at the AAAS Meeting in Toronto, Canada, Jan. 3-8, 1981.

21 “The Secret of Laser Fusion,” an unsigned article appearing in Fusion (March 1979), published and distributed before Morland’s original article would have been. In fact, Joe Manning used this article in his research, yet the government maintained he must have illicitly obtained either Morland’s article or some other in camera documents. See Day (Nov 1979), p. 32. Fusion is a publication of the Fusion Energy Foundation, a politically right-wing group committed to the proposition that the government is conspiring to deny us fusion energy because it will be too cheap to meter control. Leuders, p. 181. They oppose government censorship of nuclear information not because they fear a nuclear holocaust, but because they think secrecy retards our ability to stay ahead of the competition. Thus, although The F.E.S. is at political odds with The Progressive, they filed an amicus curiae (friend-of-the-court) brief on its behalf that spilled all the ‘secret’ beans. Why? Because they thought the government and magazine were in cahoots to set a precedent for greater secrecy. See Day (Nov 1979), p. 34. In 1981 the F.E.S. published a book written by Freidwardt Winterberg of the University of Nevada explaining the details of how to build an H-bomb, reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 6, 1981. In 1990—eleven years too late for the F.E.S. and The Progressive—the U.S. government began declassifying its H-bomb secrets due to their public availability in other countries and the need to open information to compete with other countries in developing fusion energy, reported in New York Times, 9-28-92.

22 The government stated in its affidavits that Morland’s understanding of radiation pressure was mistaken. Lueders, p. 194 Alexander DeVolpi, who read both Morland and Hansen declared: “Both have correct—and incorrect—portions. It would appear they have different pieces of the jigsaw puzzle….Neither would be useful to a foreign government in the making of such weapons…The [U.S.] Government would do best to ignore everything in the public domain because so much of it is wrong anyway.” Quoted in New York Times, October 1, 1979, p. 82.

23 Reported in “Asides,” New York Times, Feb. 5, 1981.

24 See FBI document obtained by Erwin Knoll under Freedom of Information Act. FBI Memorandum BS 117-160, at 2 (author and date deleted by FBI) (on file at The Progressive). The FBI, all the way up to Director William Webster, refused repeated requests by the Justice Department to go after numerous individuals involved in the case. See Leuders, p. 184.