Grievous Harm

Explosion over data in "The H-Bomb Secret"

Freelance Writer Howard Morland is a man with a cause. An activist in nuclear disarmament, he has often lectured and written on the subject. After visiting various federal nuclear facilities with the cooperation of the U.S. Government, he wrote an article, illustrated with diagrams, that tells how to build the most powerful weapon known to man: the H-bomb. Last week the article itself set off an explosion.

The story of some 5,000 words, with the working title "The H-Bomb Secret," was due to appear in the Progressive (circ. 40,000), a left-wing monthly published in Madison, Wis. Two weeks ago, Managing Editor Samuel H. Day Jr. sent a copy to the Department of Energy in Washington and asked for verification of the facts. The article was quickly passed from DOE'S technical experts to its legal staff. "The reaction was pretty amazing and swift," recalls a DOE official. The department informed the Progressive that publication of the material would be "contrary to the United States' efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons." DOE urged the magazine to cooperate in modifying parts of the story that dealt with secret information. Claiming that the public needs details on the H-bomb in order to debate nuclear policy, the Progressive refused to budge. Government lawyers then asked U.S. District Judge Robert Warren in Milwaukee to block the article's publication.

The Progressive's lawyers responded that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in the 1971 Pentagon papers case that prior restraint of publication is unconstitutional. (That case was the only previous time a U.S. court had been asked to grant prior restraint based solely on grounds of national security.)

Though the Progressive said Morland's material came from "unclassified sources," the Government claimed that publication should be barred under the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which prohibits the dissemination of secret information about nuclear weapons. The article, said the Government's suit, would "result in grave, direct, immediate and irreparable harm to the national security."

After pondering the issues, Judge Warren sided with the Government, at least for the moment. "I'd want to think a long, hard time before I'd give the hydrogen bomb to [Ugandan President] Idi Amin," he said. Warren temporarily prohibited the article from being published and scheduled another hearing for this week. He had a quick rebuttal to worries about the freedom of the press in this particular case. Said he: "You can't speak freely when you're dead." --

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