Sending a signal.

• Author: Knoll, Erwin
• Position: U.S. Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary - Editorial

Hazel O'Leary is almost too good to be true. Half a year ago, when the Secretary of Energy promised full disclosure of the macabre nuclear experiments inflicted on human subjects beginning in the 1940s, skeptics wondered what she was really up to. She was, after all, a former shill for the nuclear-power industry. The Department of Energy had a record of secrecy and deception unsurpassed within the Federal bureaucracy. And most of her predecessors in the Secretary's post had displayed a passion verging on the pathological for keeping people uninformed--and misinformed--about nuclear matters.

But O'Leary seems to be the real McCoy. In two recent cases involving the security clearances of scientists who are, as it happens, old friends of The Progressive, O'Leary displayed admirable--and astonishing--determination to break with the Department's dismal past.

The first case involved Alex DeVolpi, a physicist at the Energy Department's Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, who provided technical expertise to The Progressive's lawyers when the Government tried, in 1979, to stop publication of Howard Morland's "The H-Bomb Secret." (With three Argonne colleagues, DeVolpi later wrote a book about the case: Born Secret: The H-Bomb, the Progressive Case, and National Security, published in 1981 by Pergamon Press.

About ten years ago, DeVolpi wrote entries on the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb for a scientific encyclopedia. Last year, he revised those entries--mainly to add information about Russian nuclear weapons that he had garnered on a trip to the former Soviet Union. But when he submitted the manuscript to security reviewers at Argonne, they said the new information was classified and would have to be deleted. In typical Department of Energy fashion, they also demanded deletion of some passages that had been cleared--and published--ten years ago.

When DeVolpi showed the security reviewers his original, ten-year-old manuscript, bearing the official stamp clearing it for publication, they confiscated that document, seized his computer, and revoked his clearance.

That's when Secretary O'Leary stepped in. In an early-morning phone call to DeVolpi's home, she promised he would get back his computer and his security clearance--and he has. In an interview with National Public Radio, O'Leary said, "The intervention in the DeVolpi case was to say, |Hello? O'Leary to center of the Department of Energy universe: Have you received...