Secrecy has long been understood as a danger to democracy—and as antithetical to science. But how much of scientific knowledge is already hidden?
by David Kordahl
“Our society is sequestering knowledge more extensively, rapidly, and thoroughly than any before it in history,” writes physics Nobelist Robert Laughlin in his opinionated 2008 tract The Crime of Reason: And the Closing of the Scientific Mind. “Indeed, the Information Age should probably be called the Age of Amnesia because it has meant, in practice, a steep decline in public accessibility of important information.”
Before reading Laughlin’s book, I had not been aware of Howard Morland, whose 1979 article “The H-Bomb Secret” provides a dramatic case in point. The article begins directly: “What you are about to learn is a secret—a secret that the United States and four other nations, the makers of hydrogen weapons, have gone to extraordinary lengths to protect.” The next sentence reveals why the U.S. government sought an injunction to halt publication. “The secret is in the coupling mechanism that enables an ordinary fission bomb—the kind that destroyed Hiroshima—to trigger the far deadlier energy of hydrogen fusion.”
“The H-Bomb Secret” can be easily accessed on the Internet. It contains information about the Teller-Ulam design that remains classified to this day, and was written as an explicit challenge to the regime ushered in by the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which decreed nuclear knowledge to be “born secret,” automatically restricted by virtue of its subject matter. Morland’s article presented an edge case, since its sources were public, ranging from encyclopedias to government press releases. United States vs. Progressive, Inc., the suit to stop its publication, was eventually dropped. In pretrial hearings, government lawyers accidentally revealed additional details about the bomb. In a comedy of errors, other activists were drawn to the cause, which ultimately led government litigators to dismiss their own case.
United States vs. Progressive, Inc. is celebrated as a test of the limits of the First Amendment, but it also serves as a parable about scientific secrecy. Howard Morland was not himself a scientist (his science training consisted of five undergraduate elective courses), but his article contains more concrete information about how H-bombs work than anything I learned while getting a doctorate in physics (and, yes, I did once take a nuclear physics course).
The larger question in play here is that of how much scientific knowledge is freely available, vs. how much powerful actors have been able to deliberately obscure. In The Crime of Reason, Laughlin argues that the nuclear paradigm set a precedent for the broader American society, leading the government to conclude that the sequestration of knowledge is a reasonable aim. The Morland case seems to “demonstrate rather starkly that modern civilization rests on two mutually exclusive kinds of thinking—one embodied in the free speech guarantees in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the other in the Atomic Energy Act.”
Morland himself made this point in “The H-Bomb Secret”: “I am telling the secret to make a basic point as forcefully as I can: Secrecy itself, 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.”
This view of knowledge complements that of Laughlin. While knowledge can be inconvenient and even dangerous, it cannot simply be regulated away. In 1999, Morland wrote “The Holocaust Bomb: a Question of Time,” a long essay grappling with the case of Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos physicist who had downloaded computer codes onto his home computer—according to Lee, for easier access; according to prosecutors, for espionage. (Lee was held in solitary confinement for 278 days, but most charges against him were later dropped.)
Morland argues that attempts at scientific secrecy obscure a deeper issue:
The curve of binding energy was written into the structure of matter by the time of creation. Any cognitive species which begins to comprehend the relationship of matter and energy will shortly discover that sunshine, the energy source of life, is the output of a thermonuclear furnace. With that knowledge, plus a few engineering innovations, the entire species will collectively confront Hamlet’s dilemma: “To be, or not to be.” Forever afterwards, each succeeding generation will need to make a conscious choice not to commit communal suicide with nuclear weapons.
Well, either that—or the knowledge can be continuously hidden.
Laughlin points out that scientific secrecy benefits both government and business. In commerce, many scientific facts are hidden under the banner of trade secrets, which Laughlin amusingly describes as part of everyday deception in business. Scientists have a difficult time recognizing just how at odds this is with their own natural desire to share discoveries, but “now and then they notice less-gifted individuals zooming by in their Lamborghinis on the way to vacation hideaways, restaurants, and parties, sometimes waving a cheery greeting as they pass.”
Considering this confluence of official and commercial suppression of scientific knowledge, it seems likely that the world is suffused with topics that have already been explored, but whose records have been kept from view. The historian of science Peter Galison, in his 2004 essay, “Removing Knowledge,” speculated about the issue’s magnitude. “The closed world,” Galison remarks, “is not a small strongbox in the corner of our collective house of codified and stored knowledge. It is we in the open world—we who study the world lodged in our libraries, from aardvarks to zymurgy, we who are living in a modest information booth facing outwards, our unseeing backs to a vast and classified empire we barely know.”
Once the question of hidden knowledge emerges, another immediately follows. What type of knowledge has been hidden? Is it only the sort of trivia that helps weaponeers to construct their exotic doodads (e.g., ideal shapes for radar ducking, or chemical data on explosive yields)? Or does it go beyond that?
Do any hidden discoveries have a fundamental scientific importance?
Of course, it’s hard to know without having a security clearance, but reports of bizarre military experiments—I’m remembering, now, the goat-killing psychics of The Men Who Stared at Goats—inspire some doubts. Even Peter Galison, who suggests that the US library of classified information is five to ten times larger than its open stacks, notes that knowledge in this parallel universe suffers from the lack such oversight as keeps open science in check. “Billions of dollars have been spent on projects that scientifically or technically would not have—could not have—survived the gimlet-eyed scrutiny of international and open review.”
Yet closely guarded secrets sometimes leak out in mundane ways. Alex Wellerstein, who discusses the Morland case in his 2021 book Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States, documents on his nuclear history blog that Sandia National Laboratory seems to have published structural mock-ups of thermonuclear bombs on its website—as part of a department logo. Or did they? The possibility of deliberate disinformation always looms in the background.
While the secrets themselves hold some interest, it seems that our main curiosity about this “vast and classified empire” is not, at the end of the day, scientific, but moral. The known existence of scientific secrets, like the known existence of military secrets, leaves open large pastures where the imagination may roam. As Jon Askonas remarked in a 2023 essay on secrecy, “One substantial reason why many Americans believe in conspiracy theories is that the government conducts secret activities at massive scale at home and abroad and, indeed, because members of the government have verifiably lied to American citizens about those activities, both for ostensible national security reasons and to save political face.”
The foregoing paragraphs stitch together quotes from several essays better than this one, but their combined implication seems clear. When RFK Jr. gets appointed to head HHS, when millions reject vaccine protocols, when conspiracy theories flourish wherever official expertise once held sway—the problem is not just that Americans are uniquely anti-intellectual or gullible. The attitudes we hold are the predictable result of eight decades of systematic scientific secrecy. After important knowledge is repeatedly placed off limits, why should citizens feel obligated to follow institutional claims about what we should or should not believe?
I’m not sure what a better system would look like, or how we might get there from here. But I do know that the current arrangement—where knowledge is kept classified, yet institutions expect deference to their authority—is unsustainable.
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