The Secret That Exploded

New York: Random House, 1981. First Edition [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Good. [10], 288, [4] pages. Illustrations. Appendix. Errata. DJ somewhat scuffed: small edge tears/chips. Signed by the author ("Howard"). Howard Morland (born September 14, 1942) is an American journalist and activist against nuclear weapons who, in 1979, became famous for apparently discovering the "secret" of the hydrogen bomb (the Teller-Ulam design) and publishing it after a lengthy censorship attempt by the Department of Energy (United States v. The Progressive). Because of some similarities in experience, he became outspoken in the protest against the detention of Mordechai Vanunu. In 1978, magazine editor Samuel H. Day recruited Morland to write a series of articles on nuclear weapons for The Progressive, a magazine based in Madison, Wisconsin. The federal government tried to halt publication of his second article, "The H-Bomb Secret: How We Got It, Why We're Telling It", taking the magazine to court. Publication was blocked for six months by government intervention which provoked a landmark First Amendment legal case, United States v. The Progressive. The government's case for censorship collapsed when the information in question was shown to be in the public domain. Ironically, the court case produced new information that enabled Morland to correct a number of errors in his original article. According to Morland, the article's purpose was to help energize the Ban-the-bomb movement and merge it with the broader Anti-nuclear movement. The author, an antinuclear activist, published the key concepts of the workings of the H-bomb. Derived from a Kirkus review: This work addresses nuclear secrets and the First Amendment and presents how Morland researched and wrote an article on the H-bomb's inner workings for The Progressive, and what happened when the government tried to suppress its publication. A former Air Force pilot turned off by the Vietnam War and radicalized by the 1977 Seabrook demonstration, Morland is up front about his antinuke views. The point of the article was to "present the world with a real, substantial, solid, mechanical bomb, not a mere idea"; and to force readers to focus on the objective reality of nuclear weapons and their capacity for annihilation. Motives aside, Morland accomplished an extraordinary feat of investigative reporting, piecing together the mosaic of the H-bomb secret from encyclopedia articles, basic college physics books, technical articles, interviews with scientists, and government-sanctioned visits to a number of major nuclear-weapons production facilities. He insists that he received no classified documents from anyone, and his careful account of how he cracked the mystery--including errors and detours--substantiates his claim. A copy of Morland's manuscript reached the government, which moved immediately to enjoin publication--thus setting up a classic legal confrontation between First Amendment freedom-of-press doctrine and the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which bars disclosure of any nuclear weapons information if the writer has "reason to believe such data will be utilized to injure the United States." Lawyers for Morland and The Progressive argued that, if all of the material had been gathered from public sources, Morland could not fairly be deemed to have had the "reason to believe" required for application of the 1946 Act. The government contended that publishing the Morland article would cause irreparable harm to the nation; and a lower-court federal judge agreed. Prior to the hearing on appeal, however, the government dropped the suit (claiming it had been rendered moot by the publication of an article similar to Morland's), so the legal battle was never fully resolved. Despite some high-tech wading in the secret-cracking chapters, a solid effort, of interest to scientists, journalists, lawyers, and anyone concerned about nuclear weapons.