ABC's of Bombs

THE NEXT ISSUE of The Progressive magazine could be a threat to world peace, according to the U.S. government, which obtained a temporary restraining order last month preventing publication of a Progressive article on the workings of a hydrogen bomb. But the only peace the article threatens is the peace of mind of America's nuclear establishment.

The government claims that Howard Morland, the article's author, has discovered the secret of the H-bomb, and some commentators have suggested that publication of Morland's piece could give the H-bomb to Idi Amin and other ruffians of the Third World.

But Morland did not have access to any classified material, and his scientific training consists of a few college science courses. Any "secret" he "discovered" is nothing but public knowledge, available to almost anyone who cares to look for it.

Public knowledge is clearly protected by the First Amendment. Any attempt to suppress it is nothing but a crude, and ultimately hopeless, attempt at official censorship.

For years, the U.S. government played the same secrecy game with the atomic bomb, ostensibly protecting America's security by keeping the A-bomb "secret" under wraps. Then three undergraduates (one of them a Harvard student who managed only a B- in Physics 55) independently designed workable A-bombs without access to classified information, exploding the government's logic of using information control to contain the spread of nuclear weapons. Unphased, the government simply classified the student's designs.

But attempts to control public information only obscure the real point: because we simply cannot control the knowledge of how to make a nuclear bomb, atomic or hydrogen--we must control the fissionable materials needed to do so. If we don't want to live in "a nuclear armed crowd" (as one commentator has put it), we will have to stop blithely spreading uranium and plutonium around the globe under the guise of the "peaceful atom."

It's not articles in the popular press--but nuclear power reactors and their support facilities--that can really give Idi Amin a Bomb, something he could probably use right about now.