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. Read more »