https://sgp.fas.org/eprint/morland.html

[up]
---------------------------------------------------------------------

    Copyright (c) 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 help being impressed
    that their version of the secret was more authoritative and
    accurate than my approximation. What effect it had on his
    thinking will never be known, but very few people can resist a
    snow job involving official national security secrets. Judge
    Parker couldn't, at first.

    The authors of the First Amendment knew the power of official
    secrets, especially secrets with religious overtones. The divine
    right of kings was their reference point. They combined freedom
    of religion, speech, the press, and assembly in the first bill of
    the Bill of Rights to deprive the government of its most potent
    instruments of tyranny: state religion, censorship, and the
    suppression of organized opposition. The First Amendment does not
    prohibit government secrets, but it recognizes that an informed,
    organized public is the best check on the abuses that always
    accompany secret government.

    The defendants were completely unprepared to deal with these new
    secrets. We all three refused to accept security clearances,
    which would amount to permanent gag orders, but we allowed our
    defense team to go inside the security fence. Out of gratitude
    for their pro-bono legal services, among other things, we agreed
    not to inquire too closely about how the secret trial was going,
    what the government was saying against us, and what our lawyers
    and defense affiants were saying on our behalf. Erwin Knoll later
    regretted cooperating with this scheme and said he wished he had
    published immediately, in defiance of the court order. That
    action would have mooted the prior restraint case, but it might
    have triggered an espionage trial.

    Eventually, our story got scooped one more time, and the
    government gave up. Other journalists and researchers were
    duplicating the story from scratch, and underground copies of The
    Progressive manuscript were popping up in places like Australia
    and Honolulu. An author named Chuck Hansen in California gave the
    case its coup de grace with a long letter to Senator Charles
    Percy, which was widely circulated, declared classified, and then
    published in defiance of court orders by the Madison Press
    Connection, a short-lived newspaper operated by striking
    reporters.

    After the case was dropped, the defendants finally got to see
    expurgated versions of affidavits and briefs which had been
    completely secret during the trial. Those documents still have
    large blank spaces, which have been the subject of much
    speculation. For example, the first Griffin affidavit, on March
    8, identifies thirty-six paragraphs in my manuscript which
    contain secret restricted data (SRD). An accompanying list
    summarizes what type of SRD is in each marked paragraph. The most
    frequently mentioned SRD type is separation of stages, mentioned
    twelve times, followed by radiation implosion, nine times, and
    radiation channeling, five times. Boosting fuel, levitated pit,
    and several other such things are mentioned once each. But for
    eleven of the marked paragraphs, the specification of what type
    of secret they contain is still secret. I can read each
    paragraph, which I wrote, but I can't tell what the government
    thinks is secret about it.

    Another example is more complicated, but very revealing. On March
    21, Earl Munson, the defense lawyer who argued our case in the
    first few hearings, submitted a defendants' brief which began,
    "As near as we can tell, there are three concepts in the Morland
    article which the plaintiff contends are Restricted Data..." He
    identified them as "compression, radiation pressure, and
    reflection." The next day, March 22, Griffin submitted a long
    affidavit, about three thousand words of which are still blanked
    out. The day after that, March 23, a closed hearing took place in
    which Munson questioned Griffin about his affidavit. Six weeks
    later, Munson appended to one of his affidavits a heavily
    censored transcript of this March 23 closed-door discussion.
    After the case was dropped in September, enough of the Munson
    affidavit with its appended hearing transcript cleared the
    censors that it was possible to learn, for the first time, that
    in paragraph 4 of the still-missing three thousand words of the
    March 22 Griffin affidavit there is a clarification of Munson's
    three concepts.

    Griffin described the three concepts as "separate stages,
    radiation coupling, and compression." Apparently, the government
    did not want to litigate Munson's phrases "radiation pressure"
    and "reflection" because they are incorrect. Griffin combined
    those two phrases into "radiation coupling," which was correct
    enough for them to live with and then added "separate stages,"
    which Munson had assumed was not secret. To support their case
    for censorship, the government then had to argue that a foreign
    bomb designer who was suffering inventor's block would become
    unblocked on seeing my incorrect explanation, easily correct my
    mistakes, and proceed forthwith.

    Unbeknownst to the defendants, my inaccuracies quickly became the
    focus of the secret trial. The star witness for the defense, Ray
    Kidder, of the Livermore Lab, challenged Jack Rosengren's
    statement that, "The Morland Article goes far beyond any other
    publication in identifying the nature of the particular design
    used in the thermonuclear weapons in the U.S. stockpile." Kidder
    called this statement misleading and said, "No U.S. stockpile
    weapon that I know of works the way the Morland device is
    intended to work."

    On June 10, Rosengren and Grayson answered Kidder's challenge
    with a extraordinary affidavit that states in paragraph 5, on
    page 2, "There are several basically different design
    arrangements for possible [thermonuclear] weapons." The publicly
    available version of this document is then essentially blank from
    there until paragraph 27, on page 9, which begins, "The real
    secret of the H-bomb' is the combination of the concepts
    discussed above." The intervening blank pages probably contain
    about two thousand words, a term paper on H-bomb design,
    government version.

    The Griffin and the Rosengren and Grayson affidavits so
    thoroughly contaminated the court record with official secrets
    that it is still very difficult for an outsider, including this
    defendant, to figure out what was going on in court.

    (Ray Kidder also challenged Hans Bethe, whose participation in
    the case was more symbolic than substantive. Their resulting
    discussion was a private correspondence comprising ten letters
    and assorted documents which have recently been declassified and
    posted on the web. Kidder believes that he persuaded Bethe to
    change his mind and agree that radiation implosion was
    effectively in the public domain by the mid-1970s.)^12

    For legal scholars trying to understand what kind of precedent
    this case sets, the secrecy of the trial itself is a key factor.
    In general, when any part of a legal proceeding is secret, that
    part takes on dominating importance. It may be completely
    immaterial or irrelevant, but if it is secret, the insiders who
    know the secrets automatically feel justified in ignoring the
    opinions of people who don't know the secrets.

    Secret trials are among the most insidious possible features of
    any legal system. The prosecution is all powerful, and there is
    no public review. Secret trials have always been a potent tool of
    totalitarianism. In criminal cases, they are the polite
    equivalent of the dreaded knock on the door in the middle of the
    night. In civil cases, as this one was, they are still odious.

    Naming Names

    The most troubling aspect of The Progressive case for me,
    personally, was the naming of names. Senator Joe McCarthy's reign
    of terror and the infamous Hollywood blacklist were directly
    connected to nuclear bomb secrets. The Manhattan Project spy
    scandals, involving Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs, were fresh on
    the public mind, but those cases involved the A-bomb secret. The
    notion that in the 1950s we now had a terrible new secret to keep
    from the Communists, the H-bomb secret, served as a major
    justification, usually unstated, in McCarthy's search for
    Communists and Communist sympathizers in America. Considering the
    role The Progressive magazine played in opposing Joe McCarthy in
    the 1950s, it is ironic that I should have been snagged by that
    particular Cold War anachronism in the course of The
    Progressive's First Amendment test case.

    When any aspect of government is based on secrecy, keeping the
    secrets becomes more important than making wise choices. Loyalty
    dominates talent, and the search for disloyal people who might
    reveal the secrets becomes a form of ideological cleansing. Lists
    of names can lead to blacklists and purges.

    In the brave new world of Joe McCarthy, any former Communist
    could be purged of taint, and avoid being purged personally, by
    giving the names of former comrades, something movie director
    Elia Kazan did in 1952, and which still generated protests 47
    years later on the occasion of his lifetime achievement Oscar. My
    dilemma was not exactly the same, but it was too close for
    comfort. On March 26, I was ordered to provide the court with
    "the name and address (including ZIP code, street, city, state,
    and telephone number if known) of the last known recipient" of
    "each and every copy" of the manuscript of my article. Since
    January, I had passed out copies to everyone who had helped me
    craft a phrase, put me up for the night, or merely wanted a
    souvenir of something that might turn out to be historic.

    My generation missed the Great Depression, and we grew up knowing
    about the crimes of Stalin. There were no Communists on my
    potential list; all were either merely personal friends or
    full-time Quaker-type peace activists operating in the open.
    Nonetheless, I was being asked for a long list of private
    citizens who would, as a result of my naming them, be
    interrogated by the FBI about their handling of nuclear bomb
    secrets. They would all acquire FBI files. Should I go to jail to
    protect their privacy? None of them objected to being named, and
    my first lawyer insisted that I had to obey the court order,
    which I reluctantly did.

    I now have records of the FBI visits to the people on my list.
    The only interesting report concerns a peace activist named Jim
    Albertini in Honolulu, and his girlfriend Barbara Jensen. (At the
    time, he and I were involved in an unrelated lawsuit concerning
    the construction of a nuclear weapon storage facility directly
    under the final approach path to Honolulu International Airport.)
    The FBI report, a telegram in all caps, says, "Attempt made to
    interview James Albertini April 17, 1979. Albertini refused to
    answer any questions... On April 23, 1979, letter received by
    Honolulu from James Albertini inviting' the FBI to lobby of his
    office... to discuss the Morland matter.... On April 23, 1979,
    Honolulu received inquiry from press re this matter. Press
    apparently invited to this meeting. In light of the apparent
    desire of Albertini and Jensen to turn this inquiry into a public
    forum, no further attempt will be made to contact Jensen or
    Albertini."

    In September, when the case was dropped, Albertini had his copy
    of the manuscript at the typesetter, planning to distribute
    copies on the street in hopes of getting arrested and becoming
    part of the case. Chuck Hansen's letter beat him to the punch. In
    the end, nobody got arrested, or blacklisted either as far as we
    know.

    When ACLU lawyers became part of the legal defense team, they
    were so displeased with my lawyer's performance they found me a
    new one, Paul Friedman, who later became a federal judge.
    Friedman advised me that I should not have turned over the names
    without a fight, that I had been the victim of bad legal counsel.
    When I heard about people peripherally involved in the Kenneth
    Starr real estate and adultery impeachment drama, who mortgaged
    their homes to pay legal bills, I am reminded of the pitfalls of
    having less than the best in legal representation.

    Graymail and Journalism

    In the first edition of this article, posted on November 15,
    1999, I stated, "If the present H-bomb controversy [Wen Ho Lee]
    results in any kind of court case, either it will be tried in
    secret, in violation of the most important traditions of American
    jurisprudence, or I should be able to answer all my remaining
    questions about H-bombs by reading the court transcript. That
    dilemma typifies the nuclear-age conflict between secret
    government and democracy." It turns out there was no Wen Ho Lee
    trial, but pre-trial detention was used to punish the defendant
    for a crime with which he was never charged, something that is
    not supposed to happen. The defendant's rights were violated
    until the government folded its case, in part to protect secrets.

    The standard spy defense is "graymail," a form of blackmail in
    which the defense threatens to drag all manner of national
    security secrets into open court. The legal rationale behind
    graymail is that a criminal defendant should not be hampered in
    preparing or presenting a defense. (As civil defendants in The
    Progressive case, we did not have the same right to demand
    openness that a criminal defendant does.) How well graymail works
    depends on the judge, and on how many secrets the government is
    willing to compromise.

    Judge Parker began to lose faith in the prosecution's case when
    Harold Agnew, a former Los Alamos director, and others challenged
    the government's claims about secrecy and harm, and when a key
    government witness had to retract his testimony. When Parker then
    made rulings favorable to Lee's graymail strategy, the government
    knew it was time to bargain. Among other things, Lee's defense
    team was requesting an H-bomb blueprint so it could show a jury
    that characterizations of Lee's downloaded computer codes as
    blueprints were an exaggeration.

    To avoid the graymail defense, caught spies are sometimes
    recruited as double agents, debriefed in return for immunity, or
    held until a spy swap can be arranged. Intelligence agencies are
    usually more eager to protect their remaining secrets and to
    quietly learn what was compromised, and how, and than they are to
    exact punishment. When spy prosecutions do happen, they tend to
    be sensational political events, as Judge Parker soon came to
    realize, and resent.

    On September 13, 2000, Parker released Lee with the following
    disclaimer of judicial culpability: "the top decision makers in
    the Executive Branch... have embarrassed our entire nation and
    each of us who is a citizen of it... I do not know the real
    reasons why the Executive Branch has done all of this... as a
    member of the Third Branch of the United States Government, the
    Judiciary, the United States Courts, I sincerely apologize to
    you, Dr. Lee, for the unfair manner you were held in custody by
    the Executive Branch."^13

    He could have mentioned the Legislative Branch and the Fourth
    Estate as well. Republican members of Congress were trying to
    expand a White House fund-raising scandal involving Chinese money
    into a national security scandal involving nuclear secrets. New
    York Times reporters Gerth and Risen were willing partners in
    this Congressional campaign to promote national hysteria. The
    Clinton administration, having barely survived impeachment, was
    under tremendous pressure from Capitol Hill and the media to
    offer up Wen Ho Lee as proof that it was not coddling spies in
    return for campaign contributions. As a cast member in this
    partisan political squabble, Judge Parker was played for a fool.
    When he figured it out, he was not happy.

    For the record, I don't think Wen Ho Lee was a spy with a clever
    lawyer. Real spies never hold onto incriminating evidence the way
    Lee did. He was also, clearly, not a nuclear pacifist hoping to
    promote nuclear abolition by telling secrets. His actions remain
    a mystery. He is probably just a pack rat who broke the rules for
    sake of convenience. Fortunately for Lee, the graymail defense
    works for the innocent as well as the guilty.

    So I didn't learn anything new about H-bombs from the Wen Ho Lee
    court case, but a variation on the graymail theme did bring
    interesting things to light. In both The Progressive case and the
    Wen Ho Lee case, journalists published stories that otherwise
    would not have been written. In addition to graymail,
    investigative reporting is a predictable risk for the government
    whenever it takes national secrets to court.

    During 1999, I learned from Richard Garwin in Arms Control Today
    that the W-88 warhead has a center of gravity problem which
    suggests that the heavier part, the secondary, is located in the
    rear, or fat, end of the re-entry cone. Dan Stober, writing in
    the San Jose Mercury News, confirmed that arrangement and added
    that the secondary is spherical in shape, the primary is linear,
    and the radiation case enclosing the primary and the secondary
    has the shape of a peanut shell. He reported that a spherical
    secondary was first used in the 1960s for an early Polaris
    Missile warhead. I had been hearing such things for years, but
    doubted they were true. Four months later, when Bill Broad summed
    up these and other insights in a front page article for the New
    York Times, I was finally convinced.^14 (See Diagrams at the end
    of this article.)

    The advantage of a spherical secondary is greater compression and
    thus greater efficiency. The disadvantage is greater diameter.
    Only for a warhead of one megaton or less is the diameter of a
    spherical secondary small enough to be practical.

    A David Wise article in Gentleman's Quarterly, gave the diameter
    of the W-88 secondary as 17.2 centimeters (seven inches), which,
    if spherical, means a volume of two and two-thirds liters.^15 The
    maximum theoretical yield for a secondary is about two hundred
    kilotons per liter, assuming equal volumes of fission and fusion
    fuel. The math is simple. A secondary the size Wise reported
    would need to fully consume 90% of its thermonuclear fuel,
    including the uranium, in order to produce the W-88 warhead's
    advertized yield of 475 kilotons.

    If that calculation is correct, there is little wonder the W-88
    warhead is still our most modern warhead, despite its being a
    twenty-five year old, mid-1970s design. It would be a waste of
    time trying to squeeze out the last 10%. I was recently told that
    1962 was the year when weapon designers "ran out of things to
    invent." A dozen years later, they apparently gave up trying.

    When the case against Wen Ho Lee was settled, the Washington Post
    ran an op-ed evaluation by Kenneth C. Bass III, the Justice
    Department's first counsel for intelligence policy in the Carter
    administration. By way of background, he had the following
    curious comment about The Progressive case: "claims of danger
    proved shallow when the Justice Department later learned that the
    same information had been placed on the public shelves of the Los
    Alamos Library, a fact not reported in the judicial decisions and
    thus not easily discovered by counsel or judges who want to know
    why the government consented to vacate the injunction."^16

    His timing seems off. In citing the library document rather than
    the Hansen letter, either Bass is confused, or he knows an
    interesting story that I don't know.

    UCRL-4725, the document Bass referred to, was the Livermore Lab's
    monthly progress report for June of 1956, written during the
    Redwing nuclear test series in the Pacific. It described test
    results from May and June and plans for the remaining tests in
    July. It was discovered at Los Alamos on May 7, 1979, by Dimitri
    Rotow, an ACLU researcher who was sent there to see what he could
    find. It had been declassified and placed on the open shelves
    four years earlier, in 1975. I had never seen it.

    Rotow mailed copies to journalists and interested parties around
    the nation. The Chicago Sun-Times ran a May 18 story headlined,
    "Secrets of H-Bomb were mailed to us." Reporter Brian Kelley said
    the document described, "how to fill the empty spaces of the bomb
    cannister with foam." I had seen the factory in Kansas City where
    plastic foam is made into H-bomb components, but I had guessed
    that the foam goes inside the secondary, leaving the radiation
    channel empty. Learning the true location of the foam was helpful
    in correcting my misunderstanding about radiation pressure.

    When I first saw UCRL-4725, I think I must have felt the way
    Howard Carter felt when he opened King Tut's tomb. It was a
    glimpse into the inner sanctum of the doomsday bureaucracy. One
    phrase that jumped off the page and into my psyche was "megatons
    per meter," often bloodlessly abbreviated as "MT/m." It's an
    obvious concept, given the cylindrical geometry of multi-megaton
    H-bombs, but to see the subtle ways insiders used it to insulate
    themselves from the grisly business of mass murder and world
    destruction was a gift.

    Like "miles per gallon," it signified potentially unlimited
    amounts of a desired thing, plus an implied challenge to improve
    efficiency. If you need more megatons, add some fraction of a
    meter to the length of the bomb's last stage, unless you can
    improve the ratio of MT/m. That phrase also codified the
    short-lived, but momentous, victory of Edward Teller over J.
    Robert Oppenheimer on the question of whether H-bombs could be
    too big or not. Mercifully, the megatons per meter phase of
    American history was short, coinciding roughly with the rise and
    fall of Senator Joe McCarthy. The smaller missile warheads that
    came afterwards (with spherical secondaries) made up an arsenal
    more like the one Oppenheimer had recommended, although the
    warheads quickly became so numerous as to be equally destructive
    in the aggregate.

    Meanwhile, defense lawyers immediately petitioned for a dismissal
    of The Progressive case, but the government argued that the 1975
    declassification was accidental, that all known copies were being
    retrieved, and that, anyway, the document was fragmentary and
    hard to understand. Rosengren and Grayson ended their 27-page
    affidavit on June 10 with the statement, "the Morland article
    retains a special significance even if UCRL-4725 were presumed to
    be available."

    Throughout the summer of 1979, there were numerous in camera
    hearings and exchanges of classified affidavits concerning
    defense claims that the case should be mooted by the UCRL-4725
    discovery, plus earlier articles from the Milwaukee Sentinel,
    Fusion, and New Solidarity.^17 The government continued to deny
    that the story they were trying to suppress was being told
    anyway. The case dragged on until September, when it finally
    sailed into the judicially hostile waters of the Chicago appeals
    court. By the time the Hansen letter arrived on the scene, we had
    begun to hear that the government wanted out.

    The moral: one way or another, in a civilized democracy a court
    case becomes a leak machine. Government secrets have a hard time
    staying secret when they go to court.

    Arms Control Today

    Despite The Progressive's effort to demonstrate that there is no
    secret, the H-bomb secret seems to be alive and well in popular
    culture. The Wen Ho Lee case with its accusations of mis-handled
    nuclear secrets was a factor in two important 1999 U.S. Senate
    votes, the March 17 vote, 97 to 3, to deploy a missile defense
    system, and the October 13 vote, 48 to 51, to reject the
    Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. As Einstein explained in 1947,
    secrets, defenses, and arms control are interrelated -- the
    absence of the first two necessitates the third. Senate opponents
    of nuclear arms control implicitly concede the Einstein
    formulation by promoting secrets and defense as part of their
    package.

    During my decade as an arms control lobbyist and defense policy
    analyst on Capitol Hill, in the 1980s, I saw every possible
    wrinkle in what was originally called the anti-ballistic missile,
    or ABM debate. Ballistic missile defense was considered dead
    until Edward Teller, using his authority as Father of the H-bomb
    and his resulting access to President Ronald Reagan, resurrected
    it as the Strategic Defense Initiative, the so-called Star Wars
    program. The arguments against it were either that it wouldn't
    work, and be a waste of money, or that enemies might think it
    could work and use it as an excuse to escalate their offensive
    capability, which would nullify missile defense whether it worked
    or not.

    There was a treaty effectively prohibiting it, based on both of
    those arguments, a treaty which the United States has ratified.
    The Senate vote was a serious step toward abrogating that ABM
    treaty.

    The main argument in favor of Star Wars was a denial of the no
    defense idea and the assertion that we shouldn't leave our
    population unprotected in a nuclear war. Nuclear defense in the
    50s and 60s included duck and cover drills, fallout shelters, and
    evacuation routes. The Star Wars program was less alarming to the
    populace, but it was based on the same assurance that we can
    fight and win a nuclear war, with acceptable losses. If we can
    protect ourselves with anti-missile technology, we can afford to
    relax about arms control. But if there is no possibility of
    effective defense, then arms control is our only hope, as
    Einstein pointed out.

    When the Star Wars program came up for a vote in 1999, the annual
    ritual debate was canceled by the sudden, well-timed accusation
    that at Los Alamos during the 1980s (well before Clinton's White
    House tenure, by the way) Wen Ho Lee may have leaked H-bomb
    secrets to China.^18 By a logic which escapes me, the conclusion
    was drawn that we still have nuclear secrets worth stealing, and
    since they have been stolen, we need to build anti-missile
    defenses, despite the treaty and all the other arguments.

    The Senate's stunning rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban
    Treaty, the first time it has ever failed to ratify a signed
    nuclear arms control treaty, signals a dramatic turning away from
    any international cooperation in nuclear matters. It implies a
    belief that meaningful nuclear superiority is still possible,
    based on secrets and defense, and that unconstrained competition
    is preferable to treaties. Without constraints, the United States
    can stay ahead. Under a treaty regime, say opponents, other
    nations can cheat and catch up.

    The dismissive, superficial Senate debate which preceded the test
    ban treaty rejection is enough to make anyone despair of
    discussing the issue. The general public has lost interest, based
    in part on the notion that the nuclear threat to America was
    reduced to acceptable levels when the Cold War ended. The
    partisans who remain engaged are so partisan that it seems
    neither side is willing to accept a point made by the other.
    Nonetheless, the issue is too important to ignore, and the
    disappearance of the original justification for the superpower
    nuclear arsenals is too great an opportunity to miss. We need to
    reassess the business of secrets, defenses, and arms control.

    It seems obvious to me that ballistic missile defenses won't work
    for the same reason that we can't shoot flying bullets out of the
    air over a battlefield. We nonetheless seem destined to waste a
    lot of money trying, which is a folly I can live with if I have
    to. But what about secrets? Twenty years after publication of the
    H-bomb secret, and well into the age of the Internet, is there
    anything left to protect?

    Four Hundred Thousand Pages

    Technically, the crime for which Wen Ho Lee served his time is
    the downloading of four hundred thousand pages of nuclear weapon
    secrets from secure laboratory computers to personal computers
    and portable tapes. This certainly sounds like a lot of secrets,
    about eight hundred large books' worth. How can there be that
    much to say about bombs the size of trash cans, with no moving
    parts aside from a couple of gas valves and pumps?

    The data were originally described as 806 Megabytes, a little
    more than one CD-ROM disc, but somebody noticed that a
    typewritten page makes a two-kilobyte text file and decided that
    a truckload of books makes a better story. Either way, it's a lot
    of data. What could it be all about?

    Lee's downloads are usually described as "weapon codes," a phrase
    that suggests encrypted, digitized blueprints, especially when
    prosecutors play word games to reinforce that impression.
    However, as I understand weapon codes they have about the same
    relationship to blueprints as a doctoral dissertation on
    carburetion has to gasoline engine design. They would be useful
    to designers working at a very theoretical level, but not very
    useful at the nuts and bolts level.

    The weapon codes mentioned in UCRL-4725 involve mathematical
    simulations of radiation channeling. In the bomb business,
    computer programs that drive such simulations are called channel
    codes, or radflow codes. They attempt to mimic the transfer of
    radiation between the primary and the secondary, and they never
    work as well as the designers would like. For example, the
    channel codes for the Bassoon device, tested on May 27, 1956, in
    the Zuni shot at Bikini, made timing predictions that were off by
    50%. This fact was noted in the document, but no suggestion was
    made for changing the device design. Bassoon worked just fine,
    yielding 3.5 Megatons, in a strip-down "clean" version with
    almost all the uranium removed.

    The response to this code failure was to fix the code, not the
    bomb. Extra sensors were added for the next Bassoon test, to
    gather more data, and a hope was expressed that the next
    generation IBM computer would support more sophisticated
    simulation models that would be more accurate. Unlike bridges and
    skyscrapers, which can be reliably designed on the basis of
    theory alone, multi-stage thermonuclear weapons are designed by
    trial and error. Weapon codes come later, in an effort to explain
    the test results, and satisfy the curiosity of scientists.

    Walter Goad, a Los Alamos bomb designer from 1950 to 1970, wrote
    an affidavit for the defense of Wen Ho Lee in which he compared
    nuclear weapon codes to computerized weather models. He noted
    similar problems in "long range predictions of weather" and in
    "predictions of nuclear weapon behavior." In both cases the task
    is to predict chaotic, turbulent energy flows, slow flows over a
    large area in the first case, and fast flows over a short
    distance in the second. Success in both cases remains elusive.
    Goad said, "after the enormous investment of effort over many
    years, weapons codes can still not be relied on for significantly
    new designs."^19

    While these simulation studies were no doubt useful to early
    designers, work on the codes continued long after all design work
    was finished. Wen Ho Lee started his career at Los Alamos in
    1978, after the last warhead had already been designed. Agnew
    stated in his affidavit, "It appears that most, if not all, of
    the codes presently being refined and developed at Los Alamos
    Laboratory were modified after all of the current U.S. nuclear
    systems had entered our nation's stockpile."^20

    It appears to me that code development during recent decades is,
    at least in part, a jobs program for the labs. It produces
    mountains of classified documents, and as long as everything is
    stamped secret, it seems unpatriotic to ask if the labs are doing
    good, evil, or nothing at all. The usual proof that someone is
    doing serious science is publication in peer reviewed journals,
    but secrecy saves them from that requirement.

    In my quest to understand how the labs could stay busy all these
    years, and how the codes could grow so voluminous, I received the
    following explanation from a anonymous, knowledgeable source.
    Some weapon codes do contain hundreds of thousands of lines of
    code, but very little of the code is physics equations which
    drive simulations. Most of the code involves data management,
    input/output files, software for graphics output, etc. (It's the
    kind of stuff that makes the Windows-95 operating system take up
    200 Megabytes, or a hundred thousand pages, on a personal
    computer hard drive.) Most of the labor on weapons codes during
    the past quarter century has gone into rewriting old codes to run
    on new machines.^21

    A resumption of nuclear testing would mean new data for the labs
    to incorporate into their codes. It would also provide the
    opportunity for "add ons," which are physics experiments driven
    by the explosion. An underground nuclear explosion might have
    four to six "add ons." Science that the Labs could not get funded
    on its merits could be tacked onto bomb tests. The "add ons"
    would also allow them to do unique physics, driven by energies
    unavailable to those outside the weapons community. Thus the "add
    ons" become a hidden motive for opposing the Comprehensive Test
    Ban Treaty.

    Secrets generated by such activities have no limit, but are there
    any essential design concepts that are not yet on the Internet?

    The H-bomb Secret Today

    I am told that the W-88 warhead is unique in the U.S. arsenal,
    with distinctively shaped internal components. (Harold Agnew
    described it as "a delicate' and neat package.")^22 Obviously,
    any change in the shape of a bomb component becomes a new secret,
    unless it is declassified. But three decades after developing
    their own H-bomb, along with its associated technical-industrial
    infrastructure, what could the Chinese possibly learn about
    warhead design from Los Alamos that would make any real
    difference in the ABM debate, which is essentially an issue
    between the U.S. and Russia? Not much, in my opinion.

    While the public has yet to see a real H-bomb blueprint, the
    material in the public domain is at least an indication of how
    little there is left for a determined H-bomb design team to
    discover.

    In the twenty years since The Progressive case, a number of books
    and papers have been published on warhead designs, nuclear
    arsenals, and the related industry. All make use of information
    declassified as a result of the case. They also make extensive
    use of information which has never been declassified, but which
    is widely known outside the security fence. The Nuclear Weapons
    Databook series by the Natural Resources Defense Council, and
    Richard Rhodes' two books, The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark
    Sun, are noteworthy.

    Chuck Hansen has recently expanded his 1988 hardcover book, U.S.
    Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History, into a 2,500 page treatise
    called Swords of Armageddon, self-published on CD-ROM.^23 It
    takes the form of a well-documented dissertation based largely on
    official papers he obtained through Freedom of Information
    requests and a careful reading of declassified documents in
    various archives. A valuable reference tool, it is quite readable
    if you can tolerate the medium, and care deeply enough about the
    esoteric subject. Reading 2,500 pages on a computer screen, half
    a page at a time, is taxing. I prefer ink on paper, but that
    usually requires the backing of a publishing house. With five
    reams of paper and a few cartridges of printer ink, you can print
    it from your computer and read it from an armchair. A laptop also
    works in an armchair.

    I learned during The Progressive case that First Amendment press
    freedoms do not apply to writers. At the hands of editors and
    publishers, writers are subject to all types of censorship,
    including deletions, rewrites, and outright suppression. Freedom
    of the press kicks in for a writer only when the writer and
    publisher are of single mind, or the same person, as in Chuck
    Hansen's case. But self-publication is easier now than it used to
    be, as long as the writer doesn't need to be paid.

    A curious compilation of self-published H-bomb "secrets" exists
    only in cyberspace. It is a 1,000 page book called Nuclear
    Weapons Frequently Asked Questions by Southern California
    computer programmer Carey Sublette. For a while, it was hosted by
    the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). It now has a
    different host.^24 It has had a number of hosts since its
    founding in November 1994 by Gary Au, then a student at Melbourne
    University, Australia, but it has always been accessible by any
    computer with a modem.

    The appearance of this essay, the one you are now reading,
    hyperlinked to the FAS homepage, is ironic, to say the least, in
    light of the position taken by then president Jeremy Stone and
    the FAS in opposition to publication of The Progressive article
    in 1979, a position which Stone reiterated in his 1999 memoir.
    Steve Aftergood, of the FAS Washington staff, was kind enough to
    invite me to post it here after a number of magazines turned it
    down. I am confident, of course, that Steve is as discriminating
    as any magazine editor, but he is unconstrained by considerations
    of circulation, advertising revenue, writing style, subject
    matter, and length. He is free to post anything, along with
    supporting documents, which might contribute to informed debate
    on nuclear arms control.^25

    In my opinion, none of the public literature on H-bombs would be
    much help to an H-bomb design team, which would need to do its
    own engineering and testing, even if it had stolen computer codes
    to look at. Harold Agnew said as much in his Wen Ho Lee
    affidavit. But such public information information is useful in
    addition to being harmless; it provides valuable insights into
    public policies which were crafted in secret. The still
    fragmentary documentation in Chuck Hansen's archive and in
    Richard Rhodes' interviews with principals, some now dead,
    reveals in broad outline how some very smart people made what I
    regard as the worst set of choices in the history of conscious
    thought.

    The Contest

    It is hard for me to understand why anyone ever thought building
    a hydrogen bomb was a good idea. When one fission bomb can blow
    up a medium sized city, and a dozen such bombs can blow up any
    city in the world, why does a single bomb need to be any more
    powerful than the basic model? That was Oppenheimer's question in
    the great, secret H-bomb debate of 1949. At a time when the
    H-bomb design team had run out of promising ideas, he recommended
    a large arsenal of small fission bombs made with known
    technology, employing fusion-generated neutrons to increase the
    efficiency of fission. In other words, Oppenheimer advocated
    small H-bombs of the "booster" type. Even if one accepted the
    hideous premise of nuclear war, it was hard to find a military
    requirement for a single bomb bigger than fifty or a hundred
    kilotons. The Hiroshima bomb was fifteen.

    But the quest for the H-bomb had a mystical quality that defied
    such rational analysis. In some ways it was like the effort to
    climb mount Everest, which was going on at the same time period.
    It was a quest to prove that something could be done, and a race
    to be the first to do it. The Lindbergh flight from New York to
    Paris might be a better example. The Atlantic Ocean had already
    been conquered by air in 1919 by two military pilots flying on a
    secret mission. What Lindbergh did in 1927 was repeat the feat in
    public, with media hype. In order for his feat to be unique, it
    had to be solo, a completely useless criterion from any practical
    point of view, but the public bought it as something new.

    The uranium fission bomb had already been produced in secret,
    like the first airplane flight across the Atlantic. When Truman
    announced the H-bomb program to the world in January of 1950, as
    a response to the first Russian A-bomb, he was proposing a
    contest, much like the cash prize offered for the first solo
    transatlantic flight. In order to make the new bomb seem like a
    unique feat, a real breakthrough and not just a refinement of
    existing technology, it was assumed that it should be powered
    mostly by hydrogen fusion rather than uranium fission and it
    should be a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb,
    on the order of fifteen megatons rather than fifteen kilotons.
    The H-bomb race would be conducted on center stage of the Cold
    War, but unlike the Lindbergh flight, the details would be kept
    secret. Because of secrecy, the contestants in the H-bomb race
    could cheat, as long as they produced a really big explosion. And
    cheat they did.

    The quest for the H-bomb was based in part on a false premise:
    that there is an inherent limitation on the size and power of a
    uranium fission bomb, namely the limitation imposed by critical
    mass considerations. When a sphere of uranium-235 any larger than
    a softball is assembled, a nuclear chain reaction will start
    prematurely. This must, of course, be avoided until the moment of
    detonation. If only one critical mass (one softball) is used, the
    size of the explosion is limited to a few tens of kilotons. This
    was the supposed limitation.

    There were always a number of obvious ways of getting around this
    restriction. Cylindrical shape was one. If a uranium-235 cylinder
    has a diameter slightly smaller than a softball, the cylinder can
    be arbitrarily long without exceeding critical mass. A hollow
    cylinder, open at the ends, would work even better. The mass may
    be several times larger than critical for a sphere, but because
    of shape, namely the high ratio of external surface area to
    volume, the uranium will avoid criticality until its detonation
    by implosion. Designs based on this or similar principles were
    called "multi-crit" designs. The largest one ever tested was the
    super-oralloy bomb of the 1952 Ivy- King test. (Oralloy, for Oak
    Ridge alloy, was the wartime code name for uranium-235.) It
    exploded with a yield of 500 kilotons, the largest pure fission
    explosion ever.

    Another technique was to use uranium-238, which has no critical
    mass limitation and which, by the way, is dirt cheap. The bomb
    can have as much uranium-238 as the designer wants, in any shape,
    but the neutrons for fission must come from an outside source,
    namely fusion. By the mid-1940s, it was known that a lot of
    fission could supply the heat to cause a little fusion, and that
    a little fusion could in turn produce the neutrons to cause a lot
    more fission, with the ultimate yield being limited only by the
    amount of uranium in the bomb. It was a promising idea, but the
    first schemes for exploiting it, code-named Alarm Clock, were
    cumbersome.

    In January of 1951, Stanislaw Ulam suggested another method for
    circumventing the critical mass limitation. He proposed breaking
    up uranium-235 into discrete chunks, or stages, and setting off
    the chunks in rapid sequence, like a chain of firecrackers. It
    would have worked, but his idea quickly led to the successful
    H-bomb design based on radiation implosion, in which the second
    firecracker could be so much more powerful and efficient than the
    first that only two were needed. Radiation implosion made all
    previous ideas obsolete as stand-alone designs, but the new
    design eventually incorporated most of the old ideas and made
    them much more practical, all because of the high compression
    made possible by radiation from the first firecracker in the two-
    firecracker chain.

    In hindsight, the winning design was so simple nobody could
    understand why it took ten years to think it up. Two
    contradictory theories emerged to explain the delay, and since
    contradictions often persist unresolved in politics, especially
    in secret politics, both were used. One theory was that pinkos
    like Openheimer and his fellow travelers had obstructed progress.
    During the 1950s, every relevant government entity wrote its own
    version of the H-bomb history, hinting broadly that dovish
    sentiment among scientists had slowed things down. All have been
    declassified with deletions during the past twenty years, and
    collected by Chuck Hansen. They include H-bomb chronologies
    written by the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, by
    the Pentagon's Military Liaison Committee to the Atomic Energy
    Commission, and by the Atomic Energy Commission itself.^26

    The alternative theory was that radiation implosion, simple once
    you know it, is actually almost impossible for mere mortals to
    invent without divine help, or leaks from Los Alamos. This theory
    absolved the scientists of any blame for the delay, but it
    powerfully reinforced the admonition to wrap the entire
    thermonuclear industry in a blanket of secrecy. Two short
    histories written independently by Hans Bethe, in 1952 and in
    1954, advance the idea that progress was as rapid as it could
    have been. Politics aside, Bethe's histories give the best
    technical synopsis. The second, the 1954 version was declassified
    first, in 1980.^27

    According to all of these accounts, Teller's original H-bomb plan
    was to use a small fission bomb to light one end of a cannister
    of deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, and cause a self-sustaining
    fusion reaction to propagate through the length of the cannister,
    like the detonation wave that propagates through a stick of
    dynamite. This was the "Classical Superbomb," also known as the
    "Runaway Super," which Bethe referred to as Method A, in his 1954
    history. In 1950, Stanislaw Ulam convinced everyone at Los Alamos
    that the fusion reaction would not propagate. His reports from
    Johnny von Neumann that "icicles are forming" meant that in
    mathematical simulations of the detonation, on the Princeton
    MANIAC computer, ignition temperatures could not be maintained by
    the detonation wave in the cannister of hydrogen. The true
    hydrogen bomb was thus abandoned, in favor of making a
    multi-megaton explosion, period.

    The theoretical failure of Teller's hydrogen superbomb revived
    interest in 1946 Alarm Clock design. In the Alarm Clock,
    alternating layers of hydrogen fusion fuel and uranium fission
    fuel were arranged to take advantage of the aforementioned
    symbiotic relationship between fission and fusion. Uranium
    fission would produce the temperatures necessary for fusion, and
    hydrogen fusion would produce the neutrons necessary for more
    uranium fission. When the fusion reaction began to cool below its
    ignition point, more fission would heat it up again and keep it
    going.

    The name Alarm Clock was a nonsense code name; it was supposed to
    wake people up to the possibilities of H-bombs. The Russians
    chose a physically more descriptive term for the same design
    concept: Sloika, a layered pastry cake. Bethe referred to it as
    Method B.

    Because of the high energy neutrons in the Alarm Clock/Sloika
    design, relatively cheap uranium-238 becomes as explosive as the
    much more expensive uranium-235, but unconstrained by criticality
    considerations. The Alarm Clock design may have originated as a
    way of keeping the temperature up in the fusion fuel, but in
    practical terms it was a way to make a very cheap, dirty uranium
    bomb of unlimited power.^28

    Despite the public hype about the hydrogen bomb contest, there
    was a serious problem with any weapon based mostly on fusion
    energy. It doesn't produce a very satisfactory explosion. In
    uranium fission, 90% of the energy is released as the kinetic
    energy of highly-charged, fully- ionized fission fragments.
    Fission fragments are the split pieces of uranium nuclei. With a
    high electrostatic charge, a value of plus forty-six on average,
    these fission fragments convert their energy to heat quickly and
    within inches, producing an intense point source of heat. The
    resulting blast and fire is the whole point of a nuclear
    explosion.

    In fusion, on the other hand, only 20% of the energy is released
    as the kinetic energy of charged fusion products, and their
    electrostatic charge is only a plus two. Because of the lower
    charge, the bremsstrahlung effect, which produces the heat, is
    much less powerful with fusion products than with fission
    products. More importantly, the bulk of the fusion energy, 80%,
    is carried off by neutrally-charged neutrons which can travel
    hundreds of yards before colliding with something and giving up
    their energy. By themselves, neutrons are very inefficient
    producers of blast and fire. But an H-bomb which is designed so
    that every fusion-produced neutron results in a uranium fission
    event is very efficient. It not only converts relatively useless
    neutron energy into blast and fire energy, it also multiplies the
    total energy release by a factor of ten or more. The neutron,
    with an energy value of 14 million electron volts (MeV), produces
    a fission event worth 180 MeV.

    This dramatic multiplication of yield has proved irresistible to
    bomb designers, despite the fact that it makes an extremely dirty
    explosion with vast amounts of lethal radioactive fallout.

    In the Alarm Clock design, the layers of uranium embedded in the
    fusion fuel were thus far more than a means of keeping the fusion
    fire burning. In a weapon optimized for fission-fusion symbiosis,
    fission would actually dominate the explosion, providing 90% of
    the total energy and virtually all of the energy that contributed
    to blast and fire. It would be more a uranium bomb than a
    hydrogen bomb. Was this cheating? Did it meet Truman's criteria
    for a hydrogen bomb?

    This vexing question was ultimately resolved at a famous secret
    Princeton conference in June of 1951 where it was decided that
    "any thermonuclear device yielding very great energy" would meet
    the 1950 Truman directive, and qualify as an H-bomb.^29

    Meanwhile, it took three more developments to complete the design
    and make the Alarm Clock a practical weapon: boosting (Bethe's
    Method C, invented by Teller in 1947), radiation implosion
    (Bethe's Method D, invented by Ulam and Teller in 1951), and the
    spark plug (Teller in 1951).

    Boosting is the use of small, gram amounts of gaseous heavy
    hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, which fuse to add neutrons and
    improve the efficiency of ordinary fission bombs, or H-bomb
    primaries. By saying that boosting is all we really needed,
    Oppenheimer got the reputation of being anti-H-Bomb and was
    kicked out of the club. Radiation implosion is the so-called
    H-bomb secret that got The Progressive dragged into court in
    1979. The spark plug is a mass of uranium-235 in the core of the
    secondary stage, where it fissions and provides the heat to start
    the main fusion reaction. I described the spark plug in The
    Progressive's Errata, along with the plastic channel filler.

    Apparently, both the channel filler and the spark plug are still
    considered classified. For twenty years, the spark plug has been
    mentioned in every published description of nuclear weapon
    design, as long as the author is not directly associated with the
    government. One exception to that rule: Edward Teller himself
    mentioned the spark plug in a interview he gave a few days after
    the government dropped The Progressive case in 1979.^30 It is
    necessarily taken into account when private estimates are made of
    the fissile material stockpile. But all references to the spark
    plug are still excised from the official documents of the period.

    Richard Rhodes assures me that his sources, including Bethe,
    credit Teller with this invention in 1951, but I would have
    thought the spark plug was inherent in the 1946 Alarm Clock
    concept, and also in Ulam's proposed separation of stages, since
    Ulam was working on pure fission devices when he thought of it.

    In his earlier, more detailed thermonuclear history written in
    1952 and partially declassified in 1990, Bethe calls the designs
    by their real names. He makes it clear that Method A (Teller's
    superbomb) was abandoned and that ultimately the H-bomb was a
    combination of all the other ideas: namely separate stages in
    which x-rays from a fusion-boosted primary stage, compress
    (implode) a secondary stage which is patterned on the Alarm Clock
    concept. The Alarm Clock secondary is what makes the H-bomb a
    dirty uranium bomb, rather than a true hydrogen bomb.

    Dirty Bombs and Clean Bombs

    The H-bomb's heavy reliance on uranium fission was revealed to
    the world in March of 1954, when a Japanese fishing boat called
    the Lucky Dragon sailed home covered with fallout from the Castle
    Bravo test at Bikini Atoll. One fisherman died, all were
    sickened. Ralph Lapp, a Manhattan Project scientist who,
    incidentally, was the first person to sign Leo Szliard's petition
    against dropping the A-bomb on Japan, wrote a damning book about
    the Lucky Dragon incident. He also wrote a series of eight
    articles on radioactive fallout for the Bulletin of the Atomic
    Scientists. I would argue that most of what the world knows about
    H-bomb fallout first entered the public domain through Ralph
    Lapp's articles in the Bulletin.^31

    In March of 1999, Lapp told me that his apparent interest in the
    civil defense aspects of fallout during the 1950s had been a
    ruse, an excuse to use fallout to tell the bomb-makers' secrets.
    And the biggest secret of all, the only one that really matters,
    is that the H-bomb is actually a uranium fission bomb. The lethal
    zone from fallout would vastly overshadow the lethal zone from
    blast and fire. A serious war fought with such weapons would
    poison entire continents. It would be war against the planet.

    The public uproar over fallout led to one of the few comic
    sideshows of the period, the business of the "humanitarian
    H-bomb." Four of the 1956 Operation Redwing shots were full-scale
    multi-megaton H-bomb explosions. For two of those shots, all the
    unnecessary uranium had been removed from the device to produce a
    "clean" explosion, reportedly no more than 15% fission, the rest
    fusion. (I'd like to see more information before I believe that
    figure.) On July 19, Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis
    Strauss announced that the new clean H-bombs were important "not
    only from a military point of view but from a humanitarian
    aspect. We are convinced that mass hazard from fallout is not a
    necessary complement to the use of large nuclear weapons."^32

    Ralph Lapp wasn't fooled. He derided the humanitarian H-bomb in
    his next article, the fifth in his series on fallout. He guessed,
    correctly, that the clean versions of these bombs would not be
    the deployed versions. He wrote, "the superbomb can be designed
    to be either relatively clean or very dirty. The former would be
    desirable in the test series, whereas the latter would seem to
    fulfill the requirement of a strategic weapon." We now know that
    two of the high-yield Redwing shots were clean and dirty versions
    of the same device: the Livermore Lab's Bassoon device, described
    in UCRL-4725.

    The clean version of Bassoon, tested in the Zuni shot on May 27,
    left a crater twelve stories deep and half a mile wide and
    produced a fallout pattern covering thousands of square miles.
    Once again, a Japanese ship was showered with fallout. This time
    the fallout had a lower percentage of fission products and
    relatively more neutron-activated coral from the crater. The more
    "humanitarian" mix of radioactive isotopes caused no immediate
    deaths, in part because the crew members undertook vigorous
    efforts to decontaminate the ship.

    By foregoing all nonessential uranium, Bassoon's designers
    deprived it not only of its main explosive ingredient but also of
    a major source of compression and containment for its fusion
    fuel. To compensate for these losses, it was designed with three
    stages. The secondary served as a primary for a much larger
    tertiary, which was imploded by the substantially greater x-ray
    flux coming off the secondary. It worked, but there was an
    irresistible temptation. Anything that made a clean bomb more
    efficient would make a dirty bomb even more efficient.

    The dirty version, Bassoon Prime, was fired in the Tewa shot on
    July 20, the day after Strauss' announcement about
    humanitarianism. It was packed with uranium, not just in the
    casing of the fusion fuel package where it could accidentally on
    purpose add to the yield, but throughout the fusion fuel, Alarm
    Clock style, where it would be certain to capture neutrons and
    maximize the fission energy release of the bomb. The test yielded
    five megatons, roughly as expected. (See photographs at the end
    of this article.)

    Had Bassoon Prime been tested at its full potential of 25
    megatons, 85% fission and 15% fusion, promptly lethal
    concentrations of fission-product fallout would have covered
    10,000 square miles of the earth's surface. Over dry land, the
    same fallout pattern would have forced the long-term evacuation
    of an area many times larger than that. While no one was willing
    to test it at full yield, 500 copies of the weaponized version,
    the Mark 41 bomb, were deployed with B-47 and B-52 bombers. Some
    were still in the arsenal as late as 1976. It was the only
    three-stage weapon ever deployed by the U.S., and at 25 megatons
    it was the most powerful.^33

    For twenty-five years, Daniel Ellsberg, another secret sharer,
    has been telling what he learned as a nuclear war analyst at the
    Pentagon in the early 1960s. By then, so many large, dirty
    H-bombs had been deployed on long-range bombers that the standard
    U.S. nuclear war plan was expected to kill 600 million people in
    Russia, China, and Japan, mostly from fallout, assuming that the
    winds blew the fallout away from Western Europe. That information
    was, and remains, highly classified.

    Recently declassified documents obtained by Chuck Hansen reveal
    the internal debate provoked by this issue. It is clear that
    decision makers chose not to deploy clean bombs because they were
    not willing to sacrifice any potential explosive yield,
    especially with their new ballistic missile warheads, which
    needed to be small in diameter. In the end, the clean bomb
    charade proved only that dirty H-bombs are a public policy
    choice, not a design necessity. There is no indication that the
    bomb makers ever intended to warn the public of that fact. It
    took people like Ralph Lapp, and in his own quiet way, Samuel
    Glasstone.

    The insiders, of course, knew that a pure hydrogen bomb would
    produce a great flux of neutrons. Rather than searching for ways
    to make their bombs cleaner, the insiders were looking in the
    opposite direction: how to use all those neutrons to make the
    dirtiest possible bomb. The cobalt bomb of science fiction novels
    like On the Beach was taken seriously by people like Carson Mark
    at Los Alamos. Neutrons plus cobalt would produce a potent
    radiological warfare agent. But in a secret April 1954 letter
    Carson Mark points out that "for the purpose of maintaining some
    high level of contamination over a stated period and also for the
    purpose of increasing the total radiation dose" no deliberate
    contaminating agent such as cobalt or tantalum would be as
    effective as the uranium fission products produced by the
    standard, dirty H-bomb. As he put it, "only a mild enhancement of
    radiation levels appear possible with present thermonuclear
    bombs." In his evaluation, the standard H-bomb was the dirtiest
    possible bomb.^34

    Glasstone, the official Oak Ridge historian, managed to get his
    own version of that statement into public print in 1957 in an
    unclassified book called The Effects of Nuclear Weapons,
    published by the Atomic Energy Commission. In a section titled
    "Radiological Warfare," he discussed "the possibility of using
    radioactive material deliberately as an offensive weapon." After
    describing the problems with various proposals such as the cobalt
    bomb, he writes that the problems have been solved "with the
    development of bombs having high fission energy yields. ...they
    are, in effect, weapons of radiological warfare. ...Radiological
    warfare has thus become an automatic extension of the offensive
    use of nuclear weapons of high yield."

    The wording of that last phrase clearly implies that all nuclear
    weapons are essentially fission devices, which I believe is
    correct. In the 1964 edition of the book, which had very few
    changes, the word "fission" was added as the next to last word of
    the above statement: "weapons of high fission yield" rather than
    "weapons of high yield." A reader could now imagine that we
    routinely deployed high-yield weapons that were mostly
    fusion-powered and that the radiological warfare discussion
    applied only to a small class of particularly dirty, high-fission
    H-bombs, rather than to all of them. In the 1977 edition, the
    entire three-paragraph confession was eliminated altogether. In
    1978, I asked Samuel Glasstone why that section had been removed.
    "Lack of interest," he said. Had the fission percentage of the
    U.S. nuclear stockpile been significantly reduced? "Oh no, the
    weapons haven't changed, but people aren't interested in talking
    about radiological warfare anymore."^35 Perhaps because
    radiological warfare is considered a war crime.

    Earlier that same year, I had asked Herb York about the warhead
    modernization program in which old ballistic missiles like the
    Minuteman and Poseidon were scheduled for replacement by new MX
    and Trident missiles. The new missiles would carry eight or ten
    warheads each instead of three, and each warhead would be
    significantly more powerful without being bigger. This clearly
    implied high fission yields, since uranium is twenty times more
    compact than hydrogen, even when the hydrogen is stored in the
    bomb in its usual solid hydride form.

    I was thinking in particular of the half-megaton warhead already
    on the drawing boards, which would arm the Trident II D-5
    missile.

    The W-88 Warhead and the Trident D-5 Missile

    This warhead, which is now called the W-88, is the one Wen Ho Lee
    was informally accused of helping China understand. It reportedly
    has the highest yield-to-volume ratio of any U.S. warhead. When
    deployed on Trident submarines, in place of the W-76 warhead, the
    W-88 increases the explosive power of one submarine five-fold,
    from 20 megatons to 100 megatons, enough firepower to devastate
    several average-sized nations. Its design purpose is to destroy
    Russian missiles in hardened underground silos, before they are
    launched. In other words, the W-88 warhead is a first strike
    weapon.

    The Los Alamos designers called it the "commissar killer." Among
    the hardened targets it was promoted to destroy were the
    underground personnel bunkers of Soviet leaders. Although warhead
    designers do not control targeting policy, the nickname reveals a
    rationalization for their work. Critics have charged that such a
    decapitation policy would eliminate the only people who were in a
    position to stop an escalating nuclear war and thus guarantee
    that the first missile launches would initiate a full-scale
    holocaust. Anticipation of this situation would encourage both
    sides to strike first with every available weapon, making the
    balance of terror highly unstable.

    I had joined the ban-the-bomb movement in 1977 with the express
    purpose of supporting a campaign to stop the funding for the D-5
    missile and its new first strike warhead.

    When I asked York in 1978 why we deployed such dirty,
    high-fission bombs, he said that our goal has never been to
    minimize casualties in Russia. "You have to remember that Russia
    is considered the enemy country. Small high-fission bombs
    designed for surface burst are going to reduce global fallout by
    ensuring that most of the fission products are deposited on
    Soviet soil."^36 Sounds like radiological warfare to me, even if
    it isn't the main mission. It certainly is not humanitarian.

    I devoted the 1980s to a grassroots and legislative campaign
    against the D-5 ballistic missile. We never got more than 100
    votes in the House of Representatives, but each year we got an
    hour or so of debate during floor consideration of the Defense
    Authorization bill. Congressman Ted Weiss of New York usually
    sponsored the D-5 amendment. During one year, when Congressman Ed
    Feighan of Ohio offered the D-5 amendment, his legislative aide,
    a not yet famous George Stephanopolous, was our point man on the
    hill. Every year, the urban liberals, whose districts contain the
    greatest concentrations of wealth and educated talent in the
    country, voted to cancel funding for the Trident D-5 missile and
    its W-88 warheads. The other 80% of the House voted to proceed
    with it. The Senate never took up the issue.

    If our campaign had succeeded, there would have been one less
    American warhead for the Chinese to try to copy, if in fact that
    is what they did. (There is no evidence that they have done
    anything with the information they got.)

    W-88 Design: "Oralloy" Secondary

    The ultimate secret of the W-88 warhead, as with all nuclear
    bombs, is the mere fact that one kilogram of uranium, when
    completely fissioned, releases the energy equivalent of 18
    thousand tons (18 kilotons) of TNT. Six kilograms of uranium
    would fit inside a can of soda pop. If the published descriptions
    are correct, the W-88 will fully fission about 26 kilograms of
    uranium, a liter and a half, or two wine bottles' worth. A
    softball bat made of uranium would weigh about 26 kilograms. The
    Hiroshima bomb reportedly had twice that much uranium-235, but it
    was only 2% efficient.

    The efficiency of a uranium bomb is determined by two things:
    compression and neutron flux.

    In the very earliest H-bombs of the mid-1950s, as soon as
    radiation implosion became part of the design, it became possible
    to achieve 100% efficiency of uranium fission at the center of
    the bomb where the pressures and the neutron flux were most
    intense. You can't do better than 100%. Since that time, the
    secondary of an H-bomb has been, in effect, a fuel tank. The
    warhead's yield is determined by how much uranium is packed into
    the secondary. The only design challenge is to make certain that
    a free neutron of sufficient power finds each uranium nucleus.
    This happens quite readily in multi-megaton bombs. Not
    surprisingly, by the 1970s when the W-88 warhead was being
    designed, high efficiencies were achievable in a smaller package
    as well. Miniaturization is the inevitable direction of any
    maturing technology.

    One way to improve the neutron flux without packing a lot of
    bulky hydrogen into the secondary is to use uranium-235
    throughout, instead of uranium-238. That makes all the neutrons
    count, the ones produced by fission as well as by fusion. Each
    fission event will start a new chain reaction, multiplying the
    useable neutron flux and reducing the need for fusion. Tom
    Cochran, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, thinks
    extensive use of uranium-235 is one of the features of the W-88.
    News accounts have described the W-88 as an "oralloy
    thermonuclear."

    In the early days, uranium-235 was a rare commodity, but by 1955
    when all three gargantuan gaseous diffusion plants were up and
    running, and consuming as much electricity as the entire nation
    of France, it started becoming less rare. We strip mined the
    Appalachian Mountains for coal to burn in separating uranium-235
    from the more common uranium-238. In 1960, when the total U.S.
    stockpile yield reached its all-time high of 20,000 megatons,
    most of that potential explosive energy came from cheap
    uranium-238. The more expensive uranium-235 was probably used as
    spark plugs inside the cylindrical secondary and tertiary stages
    of large H-bombs, to heat the hydrogen after radiation implosion
    had supplied the compression. By the 1970s, when the W-88 was
    being designed, the stockpile megatonnage had dropped below
    6,000, largely because of the substitution of smaller missile
    warheads for large bombs, and there was enough surplus
    uranium-235 to make a relatively wasteful use of it in the latest
    designs.

    This use of uranium-235 in the outer shell, or pusher, of the
    W-88 secondary raised a curious environmental problem that was
    first noted with the Hiroshima bomb, Little Boy, in 1945. If
    uranium-235 is used as reactor fuel, the moderator can be
    ordinary salt or fresh water (not heavy water, or graphite as
    required with uranium-238), and the reactor can be quite small.
    Most research reactors use highly enriched fuel for this reason,
    including the one on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of
    Technology in the heart of greater Boston, but that's another
    story.

    Uranium-235 plus water equals a nuclear reactor, especially if
    the geometry of the metal allows the water to get between metal
    surfaces where neutrons can be moderated, or slowed down, as they
    travel from one surface to another. In theory, the hollow
    uranium-235 projectile of Little Boy could become a runaway
    boiling water reactor if it fell into the ocean. (Until John
    Coster-Mullen's book Atomic Bombs was self-published in 2002, all
    descriptions and graphic depictions of Little Boy had the large
    hollow uranium piece as the stationary target and a smaller
    cylindrical piece as the projectile. Coster-Mullen's contrary
    account comes from years of interviewing men of the 509th
    Composite Group who assembled and dropped the bomb.)

    The problem with Little Boy was ignored. However, by the time of
    the first Polaris Submarine, the standard primary design employed
    a hollow plutonium shell which could theoretically fill with
    water and become a reactor. Because the Polaris W-47 warhead was
    deployed at sea, a test was done on May 11, 1960, code-named the
    Stardust Program. A hollow plutonium pit was filled with water in
    an underground tunnel at the Nevada Test Site. The pit did not go
    critical.

    But the secondary is much more massive than the primary. When the
    decision was made with the W-88 to replace the uranium-238 pusher
    shell in the secondary with uranium-235, the boiling water
    reactor problem was undeniable. If the submarine sank, or a
    warhead was damaged and dropped into the ocean, the secondary
    would go critical as soon as water got inside it. Considering the
    damage a nuclear war is designed to cause, such safety
    considerations are of course trivial, but the problem was
    studied, anyway.

    A dozen years ago a would-be whistle-blower at the Lockheed
    missile factory in California leaked to anti-nuclear activists
    and environmentalists a collage of official document fragments
    warning that the W-88's oralloy secondary was unsafe when
    deployed in a water environment.^37 In fact, relatively few of
    the W-88 warheads were ever built, but it was a problem with the
    primary, not the secondary, that was cited as the official
    reason.

    W-88 Design: Compact Primary

    If the overall uranium efficiency of the W-88 secondary is, in
    fact, 90%, it can deliver its designed half megaton of yield,
    equal to thirty Hiroshima bombs, with considerably less
    uranium-235 than the Hiroshima bomb carried. Nonetheless, the
    cone-shaped warhead compartments of multiple warhead missiles are
    particularly restrictive of space, and the W-88 has the most
    powerful secondary ever to be crammed into one. It apparently
    won't fit inside the narrow end of its re-entry cone.

    In flight, the narrow end is the front. The more usual
    arrangement places the heavier, more compact secondary closer to
    the nose, where its mass contributes to aerodynamic stability
    during re-entry. the lighter, more bulky primary occupies the
    larger space to the rear. Reversing this scheme in the W-88
    causes two problems. Ballast must be placed in the tip of the
    nose cone to shift the center of mass forward for aerodynamic
    stability, and the remaining space is not sufficient for the
    usual bulky, insensitive high explosive charges which implode the
    primary. To make the primary fit into a reduced space, a more
    compact high explosive, which is more hazardous to handle, had to
    be used.

    This feature of the W-88 has caused public controversy and
    resulted in premature cancellation of the warhead's production.
    Critics charged that the more powerful, but less stable high
    explosive used in the W-88 is a fire hazard. For this reason,
    among others, in 1990 the scheduled production run of 3,000 W-88
    warheads was stopped at only 400, about two submarines' worth.
    Various fixes were discussed, but before one could be adopted
    environmentalists finally succeeded in shutting down the Rocky
    Flats plant in Boulder, Colorado, where plutonium components are
    fabricated for the primary stages of all American H-bombs. In
    1992, the remaining 2,600 of the intended W-88 production run was
    canceled. You would never guess from the Cox report that the W-88
    warhead, touted as our best, is a failed design that was canceled
    13% into its scheduled production run.^38

    Although arms controllers failed to stop the funding for the D-5
    missile, environmentalists were able to limit production of the
    W-88 warhead and force most of the D-5s to carry the less
    powerful W-76 warhead. Good for them. The W-88 may be a
    marvelous, if flawed, piece of engineering, but it's still an
    H-bomb, a crude, ecologically ruinous way of making holes in the
    ground and killing vast numbers of bystanders. It's way less than
    a wonderful thing, and like all H-bombs more of a liability than
    an asset.

    The Neutron Bomb

    During 1999, allegations in the Wen Ho Lee trial-by-press-release
    spy case expanded to include theft of other warhead designs,
    including the W-79 neutron bomb. The neutron bomb was a godsend
    to the anti-nuclear movement in the late 1970s. It was a novel
    attempt to use the neutrons from hydrogen fusion as direct agents
    of radiological warfare. The only trick was to make the explosion
    small enough for the neutrons to reach beyond the effects of
    blast and fire. The neutron bomb is routinely described as weapon
    which kills people, while leaving buildings intact, a description
    which is true only under very narrow theoretical circumstances.

    Most lay persons imagine that a neutron bomb would explode
    without causing any damage at all to real estate. Hardly true.

    An exploding neutron bomb would produce a blinding flash and an
    blast with the power of a thousand tons of TNT. Nearby buildings
    that survived being knocked down would absorb neutrons and become
    radioactive, for a long time. Soldiers inside tanks, who were far
    enough from the bomb to be protected against the blast but close
    enough to absorb a lethal dose of neutrons, would die within
    hours or days from cancer-like radiation sickness. This prospect
    was so revolting that public outcry stigmatized battlefield
    nuclear weapons of any kind. It turns out battlefield commanders
    didn't much like them anyway.

    In 1987, Morton Halperin, who was a key member of The
    Progressive's legal defense team, wrote Nuclear Fallacy, a book
    proposing the de-nuclearization of all conventional military
    forces. His proposal was quietly adopted by (the first) President
    Bush, unilaterally. Today all battlefield nuclear weapons,
    including the neutron bomb, have been removed from service. The
    army and the surface navy are nuclear free. What exactly is it
    about our experience with neutron bombs that the Chinese would
    like to imitate?

    If the Senate is really worried about other nations copying our
    warheads, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty would have been
    ratified immediately. No nation is likely to stockpile an
    untested H-bomb, no matter how much information its designers
    have garnered from spies or magazine articles. The Senate's
    refusal to ratify the test ban treaty calls into question the
    sincerity of the spy hunt. If Chinese nuclear weapons are a
    serious problem for the United States, why not take a simple step
    which places a huge obstacle in the path of all future Chinese
    nuclear weapons developments?

    I began my adult life as a member in good standing of the warrior
    class, a U.S. Air Force jet pilot. I understand that culture and
    its potential usefulness to a civilized society, but I don't see
    a role for nuclear weapons. True, a nuclear weapon will destroy
    any fixed target whose location is known, but at the prohibitive
    cost of starting or escalating a nuclear war. For decades I have
    challenged anyone to describe a bad situation which will be
    improved by the detonation of a U.S. nuclear weapon. To my
    knowledge, there is no military predicament for which nuclear
    weapons are the appropriate tool. And if they can't actually be
    used, a smart adversary will realize that any nuclear threat is a
    bluff, unless we are prepared to do something colossally stupid
    just to prove we weren't kidding.

    America is the greatest nation in history, but somehow, ten years
    after the end of the Cold War, we can't seem to live from one day
    to the next without thousands of nuclear warheads on hair-trigger
    alert, poised to annihilate scores of millions of civilians and
    poison their lands. It is not a measure of our greatness. It's a
    measure of how deeply we embrace violence - ultimate, pointless,
    suicidal violence. We encourage the world to copy our free-market
    economy and our democratic institutions, but we quake in fear
    that "rogue" nations might copy a tenth of one percent of our
    nuclear deterrence. As the nation responsible for foisting these
    God-awful machines onto the world, America has the moral
    responsibility to lead the world, by example, away from
    Armageddon.

    The reason unilateral disarmament is effectively banned from
    political discourse is that it would work.^39 It is the only
    practical way to reduce the only military threat to the United
    States. Its logic is so compelling that it must be dismissed,
    ridiculed, or suppressed. The advocates of nuclear deterrence are
    not willing to declassify the war plans and argue their efficacy
    in open debate, because popular support for the system might not
    survive a close examination of what would actually happen when
    "the balloon goes up" and the "boomer" submarines launch their
    missiles. Secrecy hides our folly.

    The Holocaust

    I once heard Daniel Ellsberg describe nuclear weapons as portable
    Nazi death camps. He was giving a speech before having himself
    arrested at the Rocky Flats plant, and he was serious about the
    analogy. When the word "holocaust" is overheard in a
    conversation, the conversants are most likely talking about the
    Nazi genocide program, nuclear war, or the recent civil wars in
    Cambodia or Central Africa. What ties those items together is the
    deliberate wholesale slaughter of a large population of
    civilians, and an effort to destroy their culture and social
    infrastructure. Nuclear war fits well into that definition, with
    the added feature that it poisons a significant portion of the
    earth's surface.

    If industrial civilization lasts another thousand years, during
    all but a few of those years the complete story of the W-88
    warhead and all other such devices will be available on the
    Internet. Such information cannot be permanently suppressed.
    Whenever someone invents something that works, other people will
    figure out how it was done.

    Nonetheless, I am confident that all nuclear weapons will have
    been banned from the earth, and that foolproof controls will have
    been imposed on the critical nuclear materials. The global public
    consensus for this nuclear weapons abolition will be based on
    widespread understanding of the technology. In my opinion, these
    are necessary conditions for human survival, and our generation
    has the responsibility to make it happen.

    We are finally beginning to learn what the H-bomb people were
    thinking in the 1950s. They were initially caught up in the
    excitement of the race, and later in a squabble over who deserved
    the credit for success, or the blame for any delay in achieving
    it. I suspect that future generations will study the period with
    a feeling of dread and disgust. They are unlikely to be eternally
    grateful to the people who claim to have saved the West from
    Communism by threatening to destroy the world. By their efforts
    to preserve nuclear abolition, future generations will honor,
    instead, the people who figured out how to drive a stake through
    the heart of the H-bomb.

    Every story about Los Alamos eventually gets around to quoting
    Oppenheimer on the occasion of the world's first nuclear
    explosion, July 16, 1945: "I remembered the line from the Hindu
    scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita... 'Now I am become death, the
    destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or
    another." I read two English translations of the Bhagavad-Gita,
    obtained from Hare Krishna panhandlers in U.S. airports, and I
    couldn't find that line. The only reference to world destruction
    in the Bhagavad-Gita comes in verse thirty-two of chapter eleven,
    which is usually translated: "The Lord said, 'I am Time grown old
    to destroy the world, Embarked on the course of world
    annihilation.'"^40

    Time, not death, is the destroyer of worlds. When Oppenheimer
    watched the Trinity fireball rise into the New Mexico sky, what
    he saw was time running out. Time will eventually destroy our
    world. The sun will inflate and consume the earth. Before that, a
    comet the size of Hale-Bopp may collide with the earth, or a
    killer virus may sweep the planet. The only world-destroying
    event we have control over is nuclear Armageddon; it will come
    when we allow it.

    Right now we have time to retake the test we failed in 1950, but
    we don't have forever.

    -----------------------------------------------------------------
   
                              Illustrations

          Clean and Dirty H-Bombs in the Megatons per Meter Age
                               [basscrop]

        The Tewa shot barge, in 20 ft of water at Bikini, waiting to
         be blown up by Bassoon Prime, inside the large rectangular
        cab (right). Its twin, Bassoon, was the "humanitarian" H-bomb
        with all its nonessential uranium removed to reduce fallout.
           Bassoon had exploded on May 27, 1956, as the Zuni shot.
        Bassoon Prime is the dirty version, with the uranium put back
        in. Both devices had three stages, a primary at the bottom, a
           secondary in the middle, and a tertiary at the top. The
         diagonal light pipes measured the radiation flow time from
         primary to secondary, providing data to improve the weapon
         codes. At five megatons (333 Hiroshimas) the Bassoon Prime
        explosion, on July 20, was the largest of the Redwing series.
         Although its potential yield was several times greater, it
          was tested at less than full yield for environmental and
         public relations reasons. AEC photographs as published in 
        Swords of Armageddon, Chuck Hansen, editor, 1995, pp V-384,5.

    -----------------------------------------------------------------
   
                                [morlan2]

    -----------------------------------------------------------------
                                [w88whl]
      From A Convenient Spy; Wen Ho Lee and the Politics of Nuclear
                               Espionage,
         by Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman, Simon & Schuster, 2001.

    -----------------------------------------------------------------
                                    
                                Endnotes

    1. A reasonably complete set of court documents for U.S.A. vs.
    The Progressive, et. al. (heavily redacted), along with my
    research notes, is on file under my name in the National Security
    Archive at George Washington University, Washington, DC. My
    memoir of the case, The Secret that Exploded, Random House, 1981,
    is out of print but is available in libraries and on the Internet
    used book market. "The H-Bomb Secret," as published in The
    Progressive, is posted at: http://www.progressive.org/hbomb. On
    March 4, 2004, a 25th anniversary symposium on the case was held
    at Cardozo Law School of Yeshiva University in New York City. The
    proceedings were published in the Cardozo Law Review, Vol 26, No
    4, March 2005. My slide show on the quest to find the secret (law
    review pages 1366-1378) is at https://sgp.fas.org/eprint/
    cardozo.html. My accompanying essay, "Born Secret," on some of
    the legal and political aspects of H-Bomb technology (law review
    pages 1401-1408), is posted separately as a .pdf file at https://
    sgp.fas.org/eprint/cardozo.pdf.

    2. For a synopsis of events in the Wen Ho Lee case, see Dan
    Stober's articles in the San Jose Mercury News, December 17-18,
    2000 and his book, A Convenient Spy; Wen Ho Lee and the Politics
    of Nuclear Espionage, by Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman, Simon &
    Schuster, 2001.

    3. Sourcebook on Atomic Energy, Third Edition, by Samuel
    Glasstone, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Krieger, 1979, pp.
    473-477.

    4. The Franck Report was published as Appendix B in Brighter than
    a Thousand Suns, by Robert Jungk, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
    1958, pp 348-360, (posted on the web at www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/
    franck.html).

    5. On the letterhead of Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists,
    Princeton, NJ, January 22, 1947, (posted on the web at
    www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/einstein.html).

    6. April 16, 1954. In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, USAEC,
    MIT Press, 1971, p 251.

    7. Freeman Dyson, Weapons and Hope, Harper and Row, 1984.

    8. "Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Secrecy,"
    Task Force Chairman Frederick Seitz, Office of the Director of
    Defense Science Research and Engineering, July 1, 1970, (
    www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/dsbrep.html). Since World War II, there
    have been half a dozen major studies and numerous periodic
    reports on government secrecy. The 1997 "Report of the Commission
    on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy," chaired by
    Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, is the most recent to call for
    more openness (sgp.fas.org/library/moynihan/index.html). Its
    Appendix A gives a history of government secrecy.

    9. Our understanding of this point was confirmed as the case
    developed. Born Secret: The H-Bomb, The Progressive Case and
    National Security, A. DeVolpi, G.E. Marsh, T.A. Postol, and G.S.
    Stanford, Pergamon, 1981, pp. 132-8, 258-9. The "classified at
    birth" doctrine was explained in "Plaintiff's Statement of Points
    and Authorities," March 8, 1979.

    10. Joint Reply Brief of Appellants Knoll, Day, and Morland, in
    the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, filed
    August 31, 1979, quoted passage released for public filing
    September 4, 1980, p. 45-6.

    11. Ibid., quoted passage released for public filing September
    24, 1979, p. 47.

    12. Posted at https://sgp.fas.org//eprint/bethe-kidder.html

    13. Transcript, September 13, 2000, p. 58 (irp.fas.org/ops/ci/
    whl_plea_transcript.html).

    14. Richard L. Garwin, "Why China Won't Build U.S. Warheads,"
    Arms Control Today, April/May 1999 (www.armscontrol.org/act/
    1999_04-05/rgam99.asp?print). Dan Stober, "Shrinking the H-Bomb,
    Miniaturization Key to Warheads," San Jose Mercury News, April 8,
    1999, p. 1A. William J. Broad, "Spies Versus Sweat, The Debate
    Over China's Nuclear Advance," New York Times, September 7, 1999,
    p.1. The first realistic depiction of a spherical secondary
    appeared in U.S. News and World Report, July 31, 1955, and was
    reprinted in the 1999 Congressional Cox Committee report. Sam
    Cohen said it gives away the secret. "Check Your Facts: Cox
    Report Bombs," by Sam Cohen, Insight Magazine, v.15 no. 29.
    August 9, 1999. Cohen describes himself as the inventor, in 1958,
    of the neutron bomb. Concerning the W-87 diagram in the 1999 Cox
    Report, Cohen complains, "Why would the United States...
    [publish] a detailed, classified design of one of its most
    advanced models in an unclassified congressional report?" He
    describes the diagram as "an extremely useful blueprint... The
    data are missing, but any competent nuclear physicist could use
    this schematic to work back to the actual design." According to
    Steve Aftergood, of the Federation of American Scientists'
    Project on Government Secrecy, Cohen later acknowledged that he
    had failed to see the copyright notice which clearly identified
    the W-87 diagram as a reprint from a 1995 issue of U.S. News and
    World Report. See Aftergood's Secrecy & Government Bulletin, no.
    80, August, 1999 (www.fas.org/sgp/bulletin/sec80.html).

    15. David Wise, "Inside the Chinese Spy Mystery," Gentleman's
    Quarterly, November 1999, p. 293.

    16. Kenneth C. Bass III, "Secrecy on Trial," Washington Post,
    Outlook Section, Sunday, September 17, 2000, p. B7. The document
    which was actually cited by the government in its decision to
    drop the case is the Hansen letter, posted at https://sgp.fas.org
    /eprint/percy.pdf.

    17. (1) Joe Manning, "H-Bomb's Secrets are Few," Milwaukee
    Sentinel, April 30, 1979, p. 1, and "H-bomb Material Readily
    Accessible," May 1, p. 1; (2) "The Secret of Laser Fusion,"
    Fusion (by the editors), March/April 1979; and (3) Uwe Parpart,
    "Implications of the Rudakov Disclosures: The Soviet Union is on
    the Verge of a Strategic Weapons Breakthrough," New Solidarity,
    October 15, 1976. The New Solidarity article, which predated mine
    by two years, but which I had not seen, featured a diagram
    showing separate stages inside a common radiation case. The text
    explained the concept of radiation implosion. It was mailed to me
    anonymously from the Naval Weapons Lab in Washington after The
    Progressive case became national news. Rosengren and Grayson
    argued that it should not moot the case because the author
    thought radiation implosion was a new development that would put
    the Soviet Union ahead of the United States and because the
    article contained nonsense about the use of anti-matter in
    H-bombs. They made other arguments about it which are still
    classified.

    18. The 700-page Cox Committee report, which was released to the
    public in May of 1999 but available to Congress earlier in the
    year, tells of an unrecruited "walk-in" in Taiwan in 1995 who
    offered to spy on China for the United States and presented a
    Chinese warhead design in lieu of a resume. The similarity of
    this design to the U.S. W-88 warhead triggered the hunt for a spy
    in the U.S. who could have provided China with the information.
    Wen Ho Lee became the chief suspect. The CIA now believes the
    volunteer spy was a "directed walk-in" who was working for China
    and only pretending to offer to work for the United States. He
    was not hired for fear that he would be a double agent. (
    spp.fas.org/starwars/congress/1999_r/cox/ch2bod.htm)

    19. Declaration of Walter Goad in USA vs. Wen Ho Lee, July 21,
    2000, (irp.fas.org/ops/ci/goad.html)

    20. Declaration of Harold Agnew in USA vs. Wen Ho Lee, May 27,
    2000, (irp.fas.org/ops/ci/agnew.html).

    21. To make them seem more valuable, weapon codes are sometimes
    called "legacy codes," a phrase I find as offensive as "stockpile
    stewardship." It reminds me of the March 16, 1962, letter from
    Stanislav Ulam to AEC chairman Glenn Seaborg, in which Ulam
    complained about being slighted in Edward Teller's book. Ulam
    identifies the book as "entitled, I think, Aftermath of
    Hiroshima.'" The actual title is "Legacy of Hiroshima." Ulam may
    have subconsciously choked on the word legacy, which implies an
    asset rather than a calamity. I think aftermath is probably a
    better word than legacy for both Hiroshima and weapon codes. The
    whole business represents a dimming of the human prospect, and I
    would rather not put nice names on it.

    22. Harold Agnew, Wall Street Journal, May 17, 1999, Letter to
    the Editor, p. A27 (irp.fas.org/ops/ci/agnewwsj.html)

    23. Chuck Hansen, The Swords of Armageddon, 1995 (
    www.uscoldwar.com)

    24. Carey Sublette, "The High Energy Weapons Archive, A Guide to
    Nuclear Weapons," (http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/). "Nuclear
    Weapons Frequently Asked Questions" is at the bottom of the home
    page.

    25. See Jeremy J. Stone, Every Man Should Try: Adventures of a
    Public Interest Activist, March 1999, Public Affairs (New York).
    An editor at Atlantic Monthly, who is married to my high school
    sweetheart, had nice things to say about my manuscript when he
    turned it down. A year after it was first posted here, a much
    shortened version of this article was eventually published in the
    Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November/December 2000, Vol.
    56, No. 6, pp. 51-55.

    26. (1) "Thermonuclear Weapons Program Chronology," Atomic Energy
    Commission, early 1950; (2) "Policy and Progress in the H-Bomb
    Program, a Chronology of Leading Events," Joint Committee on
    Atomic Energy, January 1, 1953; and (3) "Comments Concerning the
    H-Bomb Development," Department of Defense Military Liaison
    Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission, April 21, 1954.

    27. Hans A. Bethe, "Memorandum on the History of Thermonuclear
    Program," May 28, 1952, Assembled by C. Hansen on 5/12/90 from
    three different versions, declassified with deletions in 1990 (
    nuke.fas.org/guide/usa/nuclear/bethe-52.htm); and "Observations
    on the Development of the H-Bomb," 1954, fully declassified in
    1980, published in Los Alamos Science, 1982, and reprinted as
    Appendix II in The Advisors, Oppenheimer, Teller, and the
    Superbomb, by Herbert York, Stanford University Press, 1976,
    1989, with a historical essay by Hans A. Bethe (nuke.fas.org/
    guide/usa/nuclear/bethe-54.htm). The same story from the Russian
    perspective is told in German A. Goncharov, "American and Soviet
    H-bomb Development Programmes: Historical Background,"
    Physics-Uspekhi 39 (10) 1033-1044 (1996), translated by A.V.
    Malyavkin (nuke.fas.org/guide/russia/nuke/goncharov-h-bomb.pdf).
    A different translation, by James Wood, was published in Physics
    Today, Vol. 49, No. 11, November 1996. These three documents are
    the best insider accounts of H-bomb technical development.

    28. Chuck Hansen, The Swords of Armageddon, 1995, pp. III-38,39,
    for Alarm Clock fission.

    29. Quoted passage is from the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy
    Report cited in Reference 28, above, p. 65. This key passage is
    still missing from the version available from the Department of
    Energy Archives, but Chuck Hansen has restored it by comparing
    differently censored versions.

    30. The term "channel filler" was declassified in 1998, and the
    idea behind spark plugs and fissile pushers was declassified in
    1991 with the statement, "fissile... materials are present in
    some secondaries." (Items V,C,1,f and V,C,2,o, respectively, in
    sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/rdd-7.html) However, in Chuck Hansen's
    historical document collection, in places where I would expect
    these concepts to be discussed, the text is still deleted. On
    September 20, 1979, a few days after the government dropped its
    censorship case against The Progressive, Edward Teller made
    explicit reference to the spark plug, "There was no question in
    my mind how the super should be made. We needed a primary, we
    needed a secondary, we needed a spark plug. The secondary had to
    have cylindrical symmetry because that was the symmetry natural
    to the process. The energy transfer had to go by radiation in
    order to make it as close to simultaneous as possible. All this
    was clear to me." From Stanley A. Blumberg and Louis G. Panos,
    Edward Teller: Giant of the Golden Age of Physics, Charles
    Scribner's Sons, 1990, p. 130.

    31. Articles on fallout by Ralph Lapp in the Bulletin of the
    Atomic Scientists: (1) "Radioactive Fallout," 11:2, February
    1955, p. 45; (2) "Fallout and Candor," 11:5, May 1955, p. 170;
    (3) "Radioactive Fallout III," 11:6, June 1955, p. 206; (4)
    "Global Fallout," 11:9, November 1955, p.339; (5) "The
    Humanitarian' H-Bomb," 12:7, September 1956, p. 261; (6)
    "Strontium Limits in Peace and War," 12:8, October 1956, p. 287;
    (7) "Sunshine and Darkness," 15:1, January 1959, p. 27; (8)
    "Local Fallout Radioactivity," 15:5, May 1959, p. 181; (9)
    "Fallout Hearings: Second Round," 15:9, September 1959, p. 302;
    (10) "What is the Price of Nuclear War?" 15:10, October 1959, p.
    340, letter p. 349; (11) "Rockefeller's Civil Defense Program,"
    16:4, April 1960, p. 134.

    32. Strauss statement on July 19, 1956, quoted in Hansen, The
    Swords of Armageddon, 1995, p. V-220.

    33. Hansen 1995, pp. V-120-238, for the Bassoon device and test,
    and pp. VI-379-382 for the Mk-41. In Ralph Lapp's fifth article
    on fallout, reference 30 above, he described the fission of U-238
    as the third stage of a three stage device: fission, fusion, and
    more fission. He was correct in principle, and he may have heard
    that Bassoon was a three stage device. However, he did not know
    the three stages were separate and that each stage  primary,
    secondary, and tertiary  employed the fission, fusion, fission
    sequence as it detonated in turn. There was some confusion on
    this point in the public literature for the next dozen years or
    so.

    34. Carson Mark, letter dated April 20, 1954, to General K.E.
    Fields, USAEC, quoted in Hansen, 1995, p. V-15.

    35. Samuel Glasstone, Editor, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons,
    USAEC, June 1957, paragraph 9:97, p. 428. The Glasstone interview
    is reported in my book, The Secret That Exploded, 1981, p. 100.

    36. Ibid, p. 93.

    37. Posted at https://sgp.fas.org/eprint/w-88sand.htm.

    38. Hansen, 1995, pp. VII-428-434.

    39. After the Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty,
    two former Cold Warriors called for unilateral nuclear
    disarmament: Paul Nitze, "A Threat Mostly to Ourselves," New York
    Times, October 28, 1999, op-ed; and Stansfield Turner, "A Way Out
    of Nuclear Stalemate," Washington Post, November 1, 1999, p. A27.
    Unfortunately, such sentiments are a luxury of retirement; people
    still in power dare not broach such ideas.

    40. The Bhagavad-Gita, 11:32, translation by J.A.B. Van Buitenen,
    introduction by Alexandre Piatigorsky, Element Books, Rockport
    MA, 1997. Of the six translations I have seen, only one
    translates this passage as Oppenheimer did. In all the others,
    the word "kalah," or "kalo" in the line "kalo smi loka-ksaya-krt
    pravrttah," is translated as time not death. Generally, where the
    word death appears in English translation, such as 9:3, 9:19,
    10:34, and 13:9, the Sanskrit word is mrtyuh, not kalah.
    Obviously, time and death are related, as in John Maynard Keynes'
    famous statement, "In the long run, we are all dead."