Copyright © Howard Morland
first posted November 15, 1999
revised February 8, 2007

The Holocaust Bomb:
a Question of Time

by Howard Morland

Do ordinary people really care how nuclear weapons work? Conventional wisdom holds that only bomb makers need to know such things. Since no nation wants to help its enemies get nuclear weapons, nuclear secrecy seems like a reasonable exception to the ideal of openness in modern societies.

But state secrets of any kind pose a dilemma for science and democracy. Both institutions require the free flow of information. Scientific knowledge is a global accumulation of published and verified findings. It is equally valid in all languages and cultures, and all scientists will insist on eventually having access to the work of all others. Likewise, democracy requires informed debate on public policy. If the electorate is not engaged in the policy process, invested with knowledge and credible standing, the best it can hope for is to periodically elect a wise dictator.

The founders of modern democracy, as creatures of The Enlightenment, understood this, and they didn’t allow for easy exceptions to freedom of speech.

However, by the middle third of the Twentieth Century, as relations between nations were descending into hell, science gave technology such destructive powers that scientists began voluntarily withholding their findings from publication. Many disappeared into secret government laboratories to become engineers of mass destruction. Even in democratic nations, where the resulting secret technology was controlled by elected officials, the electorate had no idea what doomsday machines were being developed and what fateful decisions were being made.

In 1979 this situation was widely accepted as a fundamental necessity of the nuclear age and the Cold War. In February of that year, I challenged nuclear secrecy’s justification and utility in an article drafted for The Progressive magazine, titled “The H-Bomb Secret: To Know How is to Ask Why” � and the government challenged our right to publish it. The Carter Administration’s effort to impose “prior restraint” on publication produced a landmark First Amendment lawsuit, USA vs. The Progressive, et al. ¹

Early observers thought it was a case the government couldn’t lose, but the plaintiff’s argument for censorship fell apart after six months of litigation, and freedom of the press prevailed. The article, essentially an anti-nuclear diatribe, was published unaltered in the November issue, six months late. To this day, most people who remember the case, but didn’t read the article, think I published a set of nuts-and-bolts instructions on how to build a hydrogen bomb in a suburban garage, a quite impossible task which I would neither advocate nor abet, were it possible.

Twenty years later, in 1999, the H-bomb secret was back in the news when Republican members of Congress began leaking information to the New York Times about Wen Ho Lee, an alleged spy for China at the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico. Times reporters Jeff Gerth and James Risen pursued the story like Woodward and Bernstein on the trail of the next Watergate. On April 29, columnist William Safire told Times readers, “Thanks to the downloading of our secrets, American cities will be less safe in two years than they were at the height of the cold war.” Really?

By the fall of 2000, the case had been downgraded to a controversy over the treatment of Wen Ho Lee, who had been arrested in New Mexico on December 10, 1999, and held in pre-trial solitary confinement for nine months. He was denied bail on a government theory that unless he was held incommunicado, he might contact his spy handler � this despite a 59-count indictment for merely mis-handling highly technical nuclear data of dubious value. He was never charged with spying or with transmitting any secrets to anyone, and there is no evidence that he did such things.

In September of 2000, he was set free for time served, after a token guilty plea to one of the 59 counts and a promise to answer all questions. U.S. District Judge James Parker apologized to Lee from the bench for his pre-trial detention and scolded the government for misconduct in the case. Supporters complain that Wen Ho Lee had been racially profiled and scapegoated. Lee filed a civil lawsuit against the government, and a made for TV movie was produced.²

As an interested party, of sorts, I watched the unfolding Lee melodrama with a sense of disappointment. I thought I had revealed all the interesting H-bomb secrets some twenty years earlier in The Progressive magazine. One of my purposes then, as now, was to argue that nuclear bomb secrets are a hoax, and that public understanding of nuclear arsenals is a necessary step in the quest for nuclear disarmament. This idea was and remains a hard sell.

Although The Progressive’s was a First Amendment case, a civil lawsuit in which no one was charged with wrongdoing, both cases, different as they are, raise the same troubling issues of jurisprudence in the realm of the national security state: secret evidence hidden from the defense, highly politicized, hyperbolic allegations included or implied in public statements, and of course, underlying it all, the bizarre phenomenon of nuclear bomb secrets. How secret are they and how important? What are the benefits and costs of trying to preserve them?

Nuclear Bomb Secrets

Nuclear secrecy was first introduced by the scientists themselves, before any government became involved. When German scientists discovered fission in 1939 and announced it to the scientific world, physicists outside of Germany wanted to avoid making helpful contributions to a Nazi A-bomb. They obviously could not keep the mere fact of fission secret from its own discoverers, but by withholding further discoveries from publication they sought to deny Hitler’s scientists the benefit of international assistance in working out the details.

When the American A-bomb became a military project, in 1942, traditional wartime military secrecy was superimposed on the scientists’ own voluntary restraint. Consequently, nuclear fission was introduced to the general public in the most dramatic and terrifying possible manner, the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima. It almost didn’t happen that way.

Fission was first accomplished at Enrico Fermi’s lab in Rome, Italy, in 1934. Fermi was unaware he had split the atom, on a microscopic scale, and had exposed himself to deadly radiation (like many other nuclear pioneers, he died of cancer before the age of sixty). As it was, he simply noted that when uranium is bombarded with neutrons, a new element results. If he had realized it was barium, in addition to earning the Nobel Prize for that experiment he would today be known as the discoverer of nuclear fission.³

I have often wondered how the world would have dealt with that news in 1934. Would World War II have started earlier, or been prevented? Would it have been a two-sided nuclear war? Could a limited war have been fought under the constraints of nuclear deterrence? Would the decisive battles have been preemptive strikes on nuclear facilities? One thing is certain: a vigorous global discussion of fission technology and its military implications would have put every literate person on notice that the human condition had changed forever. No nation could have built a bomb in secret and surprised an unsuspecting world with it.

On August 9, 1945, President Truman offered the following prayer in his second public statement about the atomic bomb: “We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.” I find Truman’s prayer rather insightful. To regard nuclear weapons as the product of divine revelation is a predictable American reaction, given our religiosity, but there is truth to the idea that transcends any particular religious doctrine.

The curve of binding energy was written into the structure of matter by the time of creation. Any cognitive species which begins to comprehend the relationship of matter and energy will shortly discover that sunshine, the energy source of life, is the output of a thermonuclear furnace. With that knowledge, plus a few engineering innovations, the entire species will collectively confront Hamlet’s dilemma: “To be, or not to be.” Forever afterwards, each succeeding generation will need to make a conscious choice not to commit communal suicide with nuclear weapons.

If there is a God, and if life is a test, then invention of the bomb is the final exam for humanity, an exam written by a stern professor with a sense of irony. It’s a pass-fail test with one question and, in my opinion, only one right answer: a permanent taboo on the construction of nuclear explosive devices. Each new generation must take the same exam before assuming power. As with chattel slavery, all children must henceforth grow up knowing that a particular mistake of the past, in this case nuclear bombs, must never be repeated.

Suppose for a moment that a Benevolent Deity did indeed choose the United States in 1945 as the recipient of this revelation. What better place and time? America was the only true victor in history’s most destructive war, a war which introduced the strategy of city bombing, for which nuclear weapons are uniquely well suited, and not much good for anything else. As an undamaged democracy, destined to rule the world for a generation, the United States was in the best position of any nation to contemplate the meaning of this new development and to promulgate the new rules for the new age.

A number of Americans rose to that occasion. I have heard that no physicist of renown refused a chance to work on the Manhattan Project. But as soon as Germany surrendered in May of 1945, and while the war with Japan was still going on, wise men of the profession began to speak out. It is hard to improve on the Franck Report of June 11, 1945, written in part by Eugene Rabinowitch, later the founding editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.⁴

The Franck report was a plea to Truman, through Secretary of War Stimson, not to drop the bomb on Japan, but it also warned of a nuclear arms race and a consequent nuclear war in which the United States could be destroyed. After the war, its message was condensed to a pair of sentences in a 1947 fund-raising letter signed by Albert Einstein:⁵

“This basic power of the universe cannot be fitted into the outdated concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world.”

No secret and no defense. Implicit in that statement, of course, is a call for the abolition of general war between major powers. If the ultimate weapon is available to all industrial nations, and if defense is impossible, then any repeat of the sort of unlimited war just ended would clearly be an orgy of self-immolation for all participants. Not surprisingly, powerful forces opposed that point of view. For those who wanted to treat the bomb as simply an improved tool for fighting the next world war, the idea of giving it up was anathema.

But the Manhattan Project was dominated by well-established scientists who, before the war, had been part of an ethical system that abhors secrecy. It was, and is, a supranational community of investigators who believe that certain kinds of universal truth can be found in the natural world, and when found they must be shared. As soon as possible, they insisted on telling the world the A-bomb secret, treating the whole thing as a scientific discovery. They then went back to their civilian lives, some more concerned than others about the implications of their nuclear experiment. The physics community was thus split into two groups: those who left and those who stayed.

The ones who stayed at Los Alamos to build a nuclear arsenal effectively retired from science and became engineers. Their future output would be widgets rather than published papers; inventions rather than discoveries. While I have met only a few of the original players, I think my half century of life on this planet, as a citizen of this democracy, entitles me to the considered opinion that those who chose to make a career of nuclear weaponry created a mess far worse than any problem it was designed to solve. We’re damn lucky it hasn’t killed us all, and it still might.

This new class of professional bomb designers, most trained originally as scientists, could not easily ignore the arguments of their colleagues on the outside. If Einstein was right (no secret and no defense), then anything they produced at Los Alamos would threaten America within a few years. Potentially, Los Alamos itself was America’s greatest enemy. They needed a rationale for rejecting the no secret, no defense axiom and its arms control corollary.

As luck would have it, the 1951 invention of the H-bomb created a new secret, one that was shared only by the new insiders, who being the only ones who knew it could tell the world what to think about it. This new secret, namely radiation implosion and the tricks that make it work, was treated like a second divine revelation, an icon for the newly formed nuclear priesthood, a refutation of the no secret claim, and, most importantly, a wall between the hawkish insiders and the dovish outsiders. That wall gave a monopoly of decision-making power to people who were conveniently insulated from meaningful contact with the arms control point of view. They could hear criticism, but they didn’t really have to deal with it.

For nearly three decades, radiation implosion was the secret password. If you didn’t know it, your opinion didn’t count.

The most often quoted statement about the new secret was made by J. Robert Oppenheimer, during his 1954 security clearance hearing. When asked about his opposition to the hydrogen bomb program, Oppenheimer insisted that his objections had been merely practical, and that, “When I saw how to do it, it was clear to me that one had to at least make the thing.” He described the program in 1951 (which we now know was a reference to the design based on radiation implosion) as technically sweet, and by implication seductive.⁶

The Progressive Case

In 1979, when the Carter Administration brought its lawsuit against The Progressive, it was protecting the mystical turf of the bomb culture. It was reacting the way religious believers do when the symbols of their faith are desecrated. The plaintiffs may have been sincere in their belief that three decades of secrecy had somehow minimized the threat of nuclear holocaust, and that open discussion would suddenly weaken the national security, but government regimes based on secrecy always react that way.

The official justification for censorship in The Progressive case was the argument that a nation with an arsenal of pure fission bombs might want to go thermonuclear, but not know how to go about it. China, which already had H-bombs, presumably would not be interested. In the Lee case, the concern was that Chinese bomb designers may have been unable to figure out how to miniaturize their warheads in order to construct multiple-warhead missiles. Both arguments assume that American bomb designers at the Los Alamos and Livermore labs have an ability to invent things that would elude their foreign colleagues for decades, if not forever.

In The Progressive case the issue was the essential design concept for all true thermonuclear weapons: radiation implosion. In the Lee case, it was baggage handling. How does one fit the required mechanisms and nuclear fuels into the mid-section of a narrow cone? It may be instructive to look at what was alleged to be at stake in The Progressive case and what was and was not revealed.

On March 8, 1979, Duane Sewell, Assistant Secretary of Energy for Defense Programs, stated in an affidavit to the court that information in my Progressive article might “materially shorten the development time of thermonuclear weapons” for a proliferator nation, an event which would cause “immediate, clear, and irreparable” harm to U.S. national security. On March 9, primarily on the basis of the Sewell assertions, and without actually reading the H-bomb manuscript itself, Wisconsin Federal Judge Robert Warren issued a Temporary Restraining Order, accompanied by the statement that he would like to “think a long hard time before I gave the hydrogen bomb to Idi Amin.” That night, David Brinkley, then the NBC Nightly News anchor, escalated the hyperbole by describing my article as one containing instructions for anyone “who might like to build a hydrogen bomb in his garage.”

Editorial cartoonists had a field day with those two ideas.

By the time of the second public hearing, on March 26, the government arsenal of affidavits included versions of the Sewell language from three cabinet secretaries: Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger (former Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Director of the CIA, and Secretary of Defense), who was the person most responsible for bringing legal action; Secretary of State Cyrus Vance; and Secretary of Defense Harold Brown (former Director of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory). The government affidavit which Judge Warren found most persuasive was submitted by physicist Hans Bethe.

Bethe has been on stage during every act of the thermonuclear drama. As an essayist and chronicler he has written the most useful insider accounts of the H-bomb era., in part because he managed at different times to take more than one side of several controversies.

It should be noted that twenty-four years later the world still has only five acknowledged thermonuclear nations, the U.S., Russia, Britain, France, and China, the same five nations as in 1979. The fission weapons club still has three members, including Israel and India, as in 1979, but South Africa has dropped out, to be replaced by Pakistan. Two former nations of the Soviet Union, Belarus and Ukraine, have returned to Russia the Soviet thermonuclear weapons that once were stationed on their soil, and the superpower arsenals have been reduced. Thus, on balance, the thermonuclear world has shrunk slightly, despite publication of The Progressive‘s article. Time has shown the government’s affiants to be wrong about the announced danger.

In fact, Freeman Dyson, who initially asserted to me that “millions of people would suffer” because of my irresponsible action in revealing the H-bomb secret, soon reconsidered and published a retraction of that opinion in a 1984 book Weapons and Hope, which was serialized in the New Yorker. He wrote that because of The Progressive’s H-bomb article, “Nuclear weapons design has been stripped of its mysteries, and there is no longer any scientific glory attached to it… From now on, there will be no more first-rate scientists driving the nuclear arms race with their rivalries…. It is probably no coincidence that the nuclear club ceased to expand at the same time as nuclear secrets ceased to be secret.”⁷ In other words, he believes telling the secret was a contribution, not a detriment, to the global nuclear non-proliferation effort. That was certainly one of my intended consequences, and one I thought more likely than the dire ones predicted by the government’s affiants.

Nonetheless, it was a risky move for a small band of anti-nuclear activists to dismiss the grave concerns of their own government, a government which because of nuclear weapons has a minute-to-minute responsibility to decide the fate of the world. It was not done lightly. The three named defendants, editors Erwin Knoll and Sam Day in addition to myself, had spent many years developing our separate, strongly held opinions that United States nuclear weapons policy was, and is, profoundly misguided. We were bolstered by knowledge of the scientists’ arms control movement that began in 1945 with the Franck Report.

We all agreed that any non-proliferation or disarmament arrangement would necessarily be based on control of nuclear materials, not information. I carried with me a copy of a 1970 Defense Department Task Force on Secrecy report which specifically cited the futility of efforts to keep the H-bomb secret from Britain and China and concluded, “It is unlikely that classified information will remain secure for periods as long as five years.”⁸ And 1970 was well before the age of the Internet.

We were also aware of the unresolved conflict between the First Amendment and a clause of the Atomic Energy Act which declares the entire subject matter of nuclear energy to be classified secret until each fact or idea has been specifically declassified by the government.⁹ We were willing to provoke a test case. We had done our homework, and we knew what we were getting into and why.

Certainly, none of us had any intention of harming the United States or of hastening the day of Armageddon. Despite our First Amendment right to do so, none of us would have published a story we thought was irresponsible. In order to invoke the Atomic Energy Act, the government accused us of having “reason to believe” that publication would cause harm to the nation, but it was done as a formality. Few of our critics ever seriously impugned our motives, but most people who learned of the case through news coverage had a difficult time understanding them.

My original goal in researching the subject, before I joined forces with The Progressive, was to produce a graphic image for a slide show plus a three-dimensional model to serve as a lecture prop, both of which I eventually did. I intended to label each major component with the appropriate corporate logo and tie it to a particular production facility in the Department of Energy complex. The bomb diagram was to serve as an outline for the portrait of an industry. I started research for the project before I discovered that the information I needed was still considered secret.

From Herbert York’s 1976 book, The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb, I learned that the central H-bomb design concept, known as the Teller-Ulam idea, was not yet public. York was the Livermore H-bomb lab’s first director. Skeptical, I collected several encyclopedia articles on the subject. Sure enough, the explanations were not all the same. They couldn’t all be right, but I knew they might not all be wrong, either. It turned out that two H-bomb articles, the ones in Americana and in the Merit Student’s Encyclopedia, were written, respectively, by Edward Teller and Hans Bethe, both members of the original H-bomb design team in 1951.

The textual descriptions were vague, but both articles were illustrated by schematically correct drawings not, allegedly, supplied by the authors. Both sets of drawings showed separate fission and fusion stages inside opposite ends of a hollow cylinder, an idea that the government later argued in court was one of three essential elements of the H-bomb secret: separation of stages. In both articles, the captions under the drawings were misleading, describing neutrons, rather than x-rays, as the energy transport mechanism connecting the stages. The neutron part was true enough, but the more important intervening steps of radiation coupling and compression, the other two elements of radiation implosion, were missing. It took a few months for me to fill in the blanks.

When we suddenly had to defend our controversial decision to tell the H-bomb secret, we tended to specialize. Erwin Knoll based his public arguments on the First Amendment, and his conviction that the splitting of the atom had not rendered the Bill of Rights obsolete. Sam Day, from his four-year tenure as editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, had developed a compelling interest in “exploding the secrecy mystique that intimidates the public, including the news media, from serious scrutiny of nuclear weapons policies and issues,” to quote his 1991 autobiography, Crossing the Line. By default, I was the specialist in what became our legal defense, namely that the secret was already out.

It was a disappointment that the Great Debate we had hoped to provoke ultimately centered on legalistic arguments over whether or not the story had been scooped. If it had been, we could publish, but if there was anything truly novel in what I had written, it had to be suppressed. Once we accepted that framework, there would be no Supreme Court test of the constitutionality of the Atomic Energy Act. There would be no Clarence Darrow arguing for the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools versus William Jennings Bryan’s appeal for religion-based censorship. (The good guys lost that case anyway.) There would be no Chicago Eight trial, with the defendants giving speeches about war and peace. Even in the Pentagon Papers case, there was argument that the public had an urgent need to know the history of the Vietnam War in order debate its ultimate resolution. In the end, we were arguing not for the right to publish, but for the right to re-publish.

Because of the way the H-bomb case was conducted, and reported, some people still believe our goal was to call attention to unconscionable security lapses and to suggest that the government should tighten its controls on information. Certainly, no one who read the article could think that. But the players never control a landmark legal case; it plays itself out like any contest between opposing groups of talented and determined people, unpredictably.

When I recently reread the court documents for the first time in fifteen years, I found myself rooting for the government. In an early affidavit, Robert Thorn, Acting Director of Los Alamos, said that my story “is perhaps as suggestive of the process used in thermonuclear weapons as the original outline on the subject by Teller and Ulam,” which outline, by the way, has not yet seen the light of day, except for its title page. In contrast, our own lawyers and experts practically accused me of plagiarizing children’s encyclopedias. The government said I had done something remarkable; our defenders implied that my story was so old hat it was hardly worthy of publication, much less censorship.

I exaggerate. Actually, as the nation learned with the recent cases involving Monica Lewinsky and O.J. Simpson, it’s the duty of a defense attorney to keep the client out of trouble. Our lawyers did an admirable job of this, along with clearing away all legal obstacles to publication. They also argued eloquently and passionately for the public’s need to discuss nuclear weapons. But in the end, the case came down to the three H-bomb concepts which add up to radiation implosion, and whether or not they were both secret and correct, as I described them. The core of our defense was that nothing I had said was both.

After the case was dropped, I was embarrassed to read, in the defendants’ last appeal brief, originally filed three weeks before the government’s case folded, “at least two of the three concepts which the government says constitute the secret of the H-bomb — separate stages and compression — are publicly known. …the district court believed the third concept, radiation coupling, is secret. …However, even if radiation coupling were a secret it would not be revealed because, [deleted] Morland incorrectly describes this concept.”¹⁰

The sting of that criticism was somewhat lessened, when the next page of the appeal brief helpfully corrected my mistake. It concerns the way that the “primary,” the first stage of a two- stage bomb, sets off the much more powerful “secondary,” by bombarding it with x-rays.

In the article, I had said, “For the briefest moment, the inside of the weapon becomes an x-ray oven, similar in principle to a microwave oven, but with unearthly temperatures and pressures.” I then asserted, an educated guess, that these radiation pressures, in effect, crush the secondary which is suspended inside the oven. Apparently, I missed the implications of my own analogy. Ovens are made to cook things. Even at H-bomb temperatures, the heat effects inside the oven are greater than the pure radiation pressure effects. As the appeal brief clarified: “Essentially, the x-rays produce a plasma of energized matter which pushes on the fusion fuel tamper…”¹¹ In other words, if the oven contained a turkey, it would overcook and explode. Continuing that analogy, the secondary stage of the bomb can be thought of as the stuffing, which is crushed by the exploding turkey.

In the one-page Errata in the December 1979 issue, I explained that the turkey in the oven is a plastic “channel filler” which captures x-ray energy and explodes with enormous force, purely as the result of getting very hot very fast (ten million degrees in half a microsecond). In the original H-bomb article, I had described the conditions inside the radiation channel in terms of “a gas of photons.” For my revised explanation in the Errata, which I dubbed “exploding styrofoam,” the corresponding phrase would be “a gas of electrons.” The implosion of the secondary is driven by matter pressure, not radiation pressure. Incidentally, Dow Chemical complained that Styrofoam is a trademark, like Xerox, and that nuclear weapons do not contain Styrofoam. Point conceded; the foam is generic.

Plasma physics, the study of ionized gases, has the same cachet in popular culture as rocket science — the exclusive purview of geniuses, usually ones with security clearances. It is certainly legitimate science. Plasma is the most common state of matter in the universe: hot, dense plasma inside stars and cold, diffuse plasma in interstellar space. But if the full story of plasma physics is ever told, I wager that an inordinate portion of the field will turn out to concern the behavior of x-ray heated plastic, or similar material, in the radiation channels of exploding H-bombs. The need for mathematical simulations of this process was a key factor driving the early development of electronic computers.

I like the idea of a nuisance material, plastic foam, as the real secret of the H-bomb. It symbolizes the banality of evil which is the essence of the whole H-bomb business. Workaday people doing workaday jobs building doomsday machines based on 1950’s technology, while civilization marches bravely into the new millennium, oblivious to the death sentence imposed by a secret technology involving plastic foam. It calls to mind the most famous line from The Graduate, “One word: plastics.”

Within the small community of researchers and authors who study this arcane subject from the outside, there is still no consensus about the precise role of plastic channel filler in radiation implosion. It is agreed that the plastic absorbs energy and is heated to plasma temperatures, and that radiation “flows” through the resulting plasma at orders of magnitude slower than the speed of light in a vacuum. It is also agreed that radiation implosion operates on temperature difference. The interior of the secondary is cold compared with the heated environment around it. The hot stuff expands and crushes the cold stuff. Whether the hot plastic does the pushing or transmits its heat to a designated ablator which does the pushing a matter of continuing discussion.

Anyway, I got two and a half out of three concepts right, which was evidently a passing grade in terms of triggering censorship. My original explanation still added up to radiation implosion, which was the unspeakable idea. Technically, according to the “born secret” clause of the Atomic Energy Act, even if I had gotten all three concepts wrong, my story could still have been classified, because if it’s about nuclear energy, and if it hasn’t been declassified, then it’s classified, even if it’s not true.

The Secret Trial

How did our lawyers know about my mistake, and I didn’t? For reasons still unclear, the government decided to tell the real H-bomb secret to the court, in considerable detail. On the very first day of the case, March 8, 1979, two affidavits were submitted by the government which today, twenty-two years later, still contain substantial deleted passages. From that point on there were two trials, the show trial, for the press, and the real trial, in camera, behind closed doors.

The real trial centered on affidavits and testimony by John Griffin, Department of Energy Director of Classification, and by Jack Rosengren and William Grayson, two government experts who were former H-bomb designers. If our lawyers wanted to participate in the real trial, they had to get security clearances. As a result, forty-five special two-year security clearances were issued to defense lawyers and their typists, support personnel, and expert witnesses, and another twenty-three were issued to court personnel, including four judges. Seven defense experts already had security clearances. No clearances were issued to the defendants.

We have a convenient reminder of the exact count because in August of 1982, three years after the government folded its prior restraint case, William Grayson, the second half of the Rosengren and Grayson team, compiled a list of names of every person mentioned in any court document, plus every name mentioned in my 1981 memoir of the case, The Secret That Exploded. This list of over three hundred names, which included my high school sweetheart, a man who had died at Los Alamos in 1945, several members of Congress, and people like Phil Donahue, David Brinkley, and Dan Rather, was printed under the title, “Possible Violations of DoE Regulations, Court Orders, or the Atomic Energy Act in Connection with The Progressive Case.” Grayson’s 62-page report was obtained recently through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Obviously, nobody involved in The Progressive case had a need to know the government’s official version of the H-bomb secret. This information was dumped onto the bench of Judge Warren to influence his decision. The H-bomb secret has always been a political tool. The Progressive had proposed to tell it to the public for political reasons, and now the government told it to the judge for political reasons. He couldn’t he