Slashdot Mirror
"H-Bomb Secret" Now Online
DrDNA writes "In 1979, the US Government sued Howard Morland, Erwin Knoll and Sam Day at The Progressive Magazine for prior restraint over the planned publication of 'The H-Bomb Secret: How We Got It--Why We're Telling It,' citing national security. Six months later, a Federal appeals court vacated the restraining order on publication, and the article was published. There's an interview about the case with George Stanford, of Argonne National Lab, Illinois, a technical adviser for the Progressive Magazine. After all this time, the Progressive article is now online (4Mb pdf)."
Seemed kinda slow... So I mirrored it. Go ahead and /. it as much as you want. Fortunately, I managed to grab it before you bastards killed their server.... Now I have to RTFA.
RTFA, because this is fairly well covered there.
First, censorship is bad. Period. It is something where you can very easily and without any sort of a stretch apply the 'slippery slope' principle. As soon as you censor anything, you're well on the way to censoring everything. Unlike, say, automatic assault rifles with clips that hold over ten rounds, 'bad' speech is impossible to objectively define.
Second, the secrecy around the techniques for constructing nuclear weapons makes a lot of things secret as a byproduct, because of the incredible paranoia and perceived fear by the censors. To keep people from guessing the most secret techniques needed to construct a nuclear bomb, by extension you need to keep secret even the materials and quantities required for construction. From there, you have to make secrets out of a lot of what's involved in mining, refining, processing, and manufacturing. From there, it's very easy to do things like making accident statistics or radiation exposure documentation for the town where the reactor is secret.
It is also very easy to declare independently-created works as secrets, even though they were not derived from any government program. Imagine doing some heavy research in your local library, constructing a few tests, saying the wrong things to the wrong people, and shortly the FBI shows up and carts off all of your work. This has happened. In the article, they give the example of a member of the House who wrote a letter to the Department of Energy, asking some rather pressing questions about changes in their nuclear program. In their response, they said that not only were the responses secret, the very questions themselves were of a sensitive nature and were now classified. This very highest elected official was therefore not legally allowed to distribute these questions that only came from his own mind!
In the end, it comes down to something very simple. Freedom of speech is nearly an absolute, and it is also the most important freedom we have. Giving it up is foolish no matter what the reason.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
People always get that quote wrong.
Captain: What happen?
Operator: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What!
Operator: Main screen turn on.
I know it doesn't sound right, but that's how poorly translated it was.
The file is slashdotted. Here is a .torrent so all you bittorrent users (that should be all of you by now) can get it.
It's just an archaic, poetic way of saying things. The Bible is a good example: "I am become a stranger unto my brethren, and an alien unto my mother's children" (Psalms 69:8, which later goes: "My time is not yet come", another antiquated phrasing).
The government looked in to how hard it would be for people to cull together a working nuclear weapon design from available information years ago.
"Interestingly enough, the United States government conducted a controlled experiment called the Nth Country Experiment to see how much effort was actually required to develop a viable fission weapon design starting from nothing. In this experiment, which ended on 10 April 1967, three newly graduated physics students were given the task of developing a detailed weapon design using only public domain information. The project reached a successful conclusion, that is, they did develop a viable design (detailed in the classified report UCRL-50248) after expending only three man-years of effort over two and a half calendar years. In the years since, much more information has entered the public domain so that the level of effort required has obviously dropped further."
From The Nuclear Weapon Archive: a Guide to Nuclear Weapons
That was back in 1967, a bit more than thirty-six years ago. It probably takes a lot less digging nowadays.
Without the second amendment the first amendment is pretty hard to enforce. Please forgive me for my bluntness here, but I own a pistol or three, and I speak my mind. I would much rather have people tell me that I can't speak my mind than have them tell me that I can't own my firearms. If you take my firearms I cann't keep you from taking my speech. If you take my speech, I'll just use my firearm to take it back. Yes, I do live in Mississippi, yes I do drive a truck, and no I am not undeucated, violent, or poor.
--Forest C. Adcock--
Anyway, it's much more easy and likely that Osama would simply bribe/steal one from some Russian, Chineese, indian, or Pakistani army general down on his luck without proper staff to "account" for an already made nuke!!! When the Cold war was just Us and Russia, it was easy to track nukes.. now that Russia has broken up, there are a frightening number "gone missing" from all the army bases Russia couldn't economically hold.