Letter Bomb

Printing atomic "secrets"

The presses started rolling at 2:30 a.m.

By dawn, staff members of the tiny Madison Press Connection (circ. 11,398) were distributing copies of an eight-page "extra" edition around Wisconsin's capital. The innocuous-sounding front-page headline: A CITIZEN WRITES TO A SENATOR. The incendiary subject: hydrogen bomb "secrets" with details and even a crude diagram. Whether any of it could result in an actual bomb would soon be bitterly debated. What was immediately clear was that the paper had blown apart the legal vises tightened against three other publications seeking to print H-bomb exposes and, for the moment, headed off a collision between the First Amendment and the Government's power to decide what constitutes an atomic secret.

The drama began last March, when the liberal monthly Progressive (circ. 40,000), also published in Madison, moved to print a 7,500 word treatise by Freelancer Howard Morland titled "The H-Bomb Secret: How We Got It, Why We're Telling It." Morland said at the time that the facts in his piece, culled from unclassified documents, were far too hazy to be used as an H-bomb blue print, yet were somehow considered "classified" by the U.S. Government. The U.S. Energy and Justice departments promptly swooped down to have the article enjoined from print-- and the court battle began.

To Charles Hansen, 32, a computer programmer in Mountain View, Calif, the Progressive case was infuriating. Hansen felt that the Government was guilty of a double standard, having allowed such information to be released in the first place. When his local activism on the subject caught the attention of Senator Charles H. Percy of Illinois, Hansen wrote him an 18-page letter explaining how an H-bomb works. He also fingered three renowned scientists who had already made much of that information public in articles and interviews, but unlike the Progressive, avoided prosecution: Princeton's Theodore Taylor; M.I.T.'s George Rathjens; and Stanford's Edward Teller, who is considered the "father of the H-bomb."

All three denied the accusations.

Hansen was stunned by the explosion of notoriety that ensued. "I'm a very ordinary person," he said last week. "I never dreamed that my letter to Senator Percy would ever be published." In fact, publication was all but inevitable, since the letter somehow reached half a dozen papers. First the Peninsula Times Tribune (circ. 65,800) of Palo Alto, Calif, on Aug.

30 printed an excerpt, and inspired a DOE ruling that declared Hansen's letter classified information. Then Berkeley's student-run Daily Californian (circ. 22,000) was hit with a court order enjoining it from publishing the letter. Editors at the Press Connection decided to publish before they met the same roadblock. When they succeeded, the Government was forced to admit defeat, and moved to lift restrictions against the California paper and the Progressive, though court documents in the magazine's case remain sealed. Said Justice Department Spokesman Mark Sheehan: "There was no further point in protecting a secret that is no longer a secret."

Or one that perhaps was inaccurate anyway. Apparently the most sensitive parts of both Morland's and Hansen's essays discuss the design of multistage, supermegaton hydrogen bombs that themselves need smaller hydrogen bombs to trigger a devastating fusion reaction Yet Nuclear Physicist Alexander DeVolpi of the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, who has read the Morland and Hansen pieces, declared: "Both have technically correct--and incorrect--portions. It would appear they had different pieces of the jigsaw puzzle." Neither article, he added, "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."

Under the 1954 Atomic Energy Act, both Morland and Hansen could still be prosecuted for disseminating secret information about atomic weapons. The Progressive will publish Morland's article in its November issue, which comes out next week, and the magazine will try to get its court documents released. Says Morland:

"The case is still very much alive. The Government is still fighting for everything it can get."

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