Nuclear alert.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush's Military Industrial Complex - Face to Face with the Bomb: Nuclear Reality After the Cold War - Toward Nuclear Abolition. A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present - Book Review

The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush's Military Industrial Complex

By Helen Caldicott The New Press. 224 pages. $16.95.

Face to Face with the Bomb: Nuclear Reality After the Cold War

Photographs and Text by Paul Shambroom, With an introduction by Richard Rhodes.

Johns Hopkins University Press. 144 pages. $34.95.

Toward Nuclear Abolition. A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present

By Lawrence S. Wittner Stanford University Press. 688 pages. $32.95.

When I arrived at The Progressive twenty-one years ago as a young associate editor, nuclear war was "Topic A." Month in and month out, the magazine devoted editorials and feature stories to the issue of disarmament. And the buzz about the H-Bomb case was still reverberating around the office.

This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Progressive's H-bomb story, which prompted a classic First Amendment battle. It pitted this magazine against the mighty power of the U.S. government, in an unprecedented use of prior restraint, a federal judge accepted the government's arguments and gagged this magazine for eight months in 1979, prohibiting it from publishing "The H-Bomb Secret: How We Got It, Why We're Telling It," by Howard Morland. The government invoked the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which made it illegal to disclose any data concerning the "design, manufacture, or utilization of atomic weapons," unless the government itself had declassified it. Even though Morland had obtained all his data from public sources and interviews, the government insisted that he was "breaching security." The judge, Robert W. Warren, in granting the injunction, said, "I want to think a long, hard time before I'd give a hydrogen bomb to Idi Amin."

Warren, like many other commentators, mischaracterized The Progressive's story. It was not a blueprint for a hydrogen bomb, and it did not let some terrorist make one in his basement. Any country with the wherewithal to build such a bomb could easily obtain the information that Morland, a freelance writer, gathered himself. And as the article explained, to make an H-bomb, you would need to have "the resources of at least a medium-sized government" and the expertise that is "beyond the capability of all but the most industrially sophisticated nations." Even then it would be no easy task. Recent revelations have borne this out: The difficulty that Iraq, Iran, and Libya have had in making a nuclear weapon while investing years and billions of dollars to do so testifies to the enormity of the scientific and technical challenges.

Morland's point was simple: "Secrecy itself," he wrote, "especially the power of a few designated 'experts' to declare some topics off limits, contributes to a political climate in which the nuclear establishment can conduct business as usual, protecting and perpetuating the production of these horror weapons."

Taught in journalism and law school classes around the country, the H-bomb story has become a landmark First Amendment case. For Erwin Knoll, who was the editor of The Progressive back then, it was his shining moment. And his only regret, he...