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)."
If you read only the first page of only one article posted to Slashdot this year, make it this one. I don't think I've ever seen a more eloquent, and relevant, defense of the First Amendment.
Somebody will eventually post that we should not publish this information because other countries will get it and thus be able to create nuclear weapons.
Of course, this is bull. But I found this quote from the article puts it best:
GS: It should by now be clear to everyone that in the past we
relied far too much on secrecy. We arrogantly assumed that we
were the only ones who could develop nuclear weapons, and that
therefore we could retain our monopoly. That kept us from
pursuing international arrangements that might have held the
nuclear arms race under some sort of control.
I don't wanna dive into a political rant here, but I think the balance of power, combat, and international discussion is vital to keeping the world safe from the threat of nuclear war.
It's certainly better than destroying freedom in the name of national security.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
In 1979, The Progressive publishes an article on how to build H-bombs, and our courts hold that our right to free speech is so strong that the government can't do anything to stop the article. Barely 20 years later, Dimitri Sklyarov is arrested for publishing a program that reads copy-protected PDF files. Clearly, copyright infringement is a greater threat to humanity--or at least to politicians' campaign contributions--than H-bombs are.
Yeah. Your neighbour is probably just itching to do something with the 3kg of weapons-grade plutonium that he doubtless has kicking around in his back yard, not to mention his ample supplies of tritium and carefully shaped high explosive.
Telling ordinary people how a bomb is made presents negligible threat; it's impractical for them to make one themselves but does give insight into the most significant arms race of the last century. As for other nations and terrorist groups, they have spies to obtain such information for them, and it's still very difficult to obtain the relevant amounts of bomb-grade material.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Can you really stop people thinking ??? Do you really take the rest of the world that retarded that no other physicist than the US could come up with the "recept" ? If you read the article you might see that *FOUR* nation came up *INDEPENDANTLY* onto the recept.
Frankly once you know this *IS* feasible, as a physicist then you can come up with a solution. that then the engineereer can work upon and come up with an effective device.
Secrety is worthless in nuclear weapon run. Only experience and engineering is somethign worth.
As the article author I wish US , France , Russia and China would have worked together on stoping nuclear proliferation thru treaty , because as we may now observe every country which have money to spend on engineering can get the bomb (Pakistan, India, N-K maybe and whoever else).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Which is why we are probably never going to be at anything other than orange or yellow alert. Because if we ever go to some "reduced" alert level and there is an attack then whoever is in charge of the alert system will get in trouble for not vaguely warning us.
Come on, now. Anyone who has taken a college class in modern physics has most of the know-how to build a fusion bomb. Anyone with a degree in physics is more than capable of doing all the necessary calculations to design one. This article provides very little assistance really. The difficult part is not the theory -- it's fairly simple. The challenge lies in the practicalities of actually making one. Obtaining the materials is nearly impossible for most nations, never mind for an individual! This precludes just about everyone except major governments from building them, and it's hard even for them. Successfully assembling one without dying of acute radiation poisoning requires advanced manufacturing facilities and equipment beyond the reach of any but the wealthiest experimenter. It's just not a hazard. *Think* before you decide to restrict information.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
Short of WWII with Japan there has never been a nuclear attack on anyone from anyone in the world. Yet we as americans with our democratic control are responsible for this destruction of property and life, and we did it through our research and science.
Let us not forget that during WWII the targeting of cities and civilians was the norm, starting with Japan's bombing of Shanghi, and the German bombing of Rotterdam and London. Later in the war, with air superiority virtualy allied, huge waves of bombers pounded axis cities day and night. The Americans, with their superior Norden bombsites were able to do daylight bombing, while the British had to resort to nightime city bombing. Attack the workers while they work, and attack them while they sleep. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was only different in that one bomber commited all the destruction, as opposed to hundreds of bombers. Indeed, the two bombings using atomic weapons killed less than some of the other bombings of the war, such as the firebombings of Dresden, Hamburgh and Tokyo.
I always get a bit irritated by people who demand that the U.S. appologise for using atomic weapons, because they don't know their history. The invasion of Okinawa cost 48,000 American casualties, and close to 200,000 Japanese casualties (Including civilians). And that was just the begining. The human cost of an invasion of Japan was estimated to be over a million lives. While the loss of 100,000 lives in the two bombed cities was bad, it would have been much much worse for the Japanese had the United States NOT used the bomb.
Will our children forgive us, or curse us?
There's another choice, you know: they might thank us.
[ home ]
Thank God those days are behind us. The 21st century is a much more enlightened time.
Sadly, consolidation of the media and reduced competition will make them more likely to roll over on things like this in the future.
You misunderstand, badly.
I am against censorship. I am not against secrecy.
Secrecy is saying, "I do not wish to publish my personal information."
Censorship is the government telling you, "Publishing your personal information is illegal, and we will put you in jail if you do so."
Secrecy is fine. If the government wants to keep secrets, that's fine, up until the point where it uses censorship to do so. Keeping secrets with encryption, lockboxes, barbed-wire fences, and armed guards is fine. Keeping secrets by forbidding publication of material gathered from public sources is not fine.
Until and unless you understand the difference between secrecy and censorship, and how it is possible to be completely against one while accepting of the other, there is no point in responding.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
The human cost of an invasion of Japan was estimated to be over a million lives. While the loss of 100,000 lives in the two bombed cities was bad, it would have been much much worse for the Japanese had the United States NOT used the bomb.
And therein lies the issue. An invasion of Japan would have cost lives on both sides, many more than were lost by using two atomic bombs. Noone in the longterm learnt from it, noone had to deal with the many dead that would have resulted from an invasion. The lessons that were presented by the 100,000 dead were easily forgotten, precisely because the deaths were all on one side, and were easily dealt. Two bombers dropping two bombs killed 100,000, and it was all too easy.
The victory over Germany was earnt, precisely because we had to fight them all the way to Hitlers doorstep. Now please do not get me wrong, I understand that a great many people died in the pacific front fighting for our freedoms, and I sincerly thank all the surviviors and the fallen, but the victory over Japan was far too easy to learn any long term lessons from. We now have the bomb, killing a large population is now easy. We tend to forget the people involved, and go after anti ballistic missile systems, so we can throw our bombs at them while they cant throw theirs at ours. We try and regain the same advantage that we had when we dropped the bombs on Japan, lack of the ability to retaliate, so there is no kick back on using these weapons.
Attacking Afghanistan, Iraq, threatening North Korea, Iran and god knows who else is easy to us western nations because there is little kickback. The US people got to know a bit about civilian casualties when the WTC was hit, and they didnt like it one bit. 3000 people died that day, and the voice of America that day was one of retaliation. And they got it.
Why do the people who back these wars think Germany, France and other nations were against hte invasion of iraq? Because they have felt the ramifications of war first hand, and fairly recently. They have knowledge that the US, the UK and others are sorely lacking, that of oppression and internal strife. They know that it is better to resolve difficulties through diplomatic channels, however long it takes, rather than in battle. Hitler would never have come about if Germany had been better treated after World War 1. World War 1 would never have taken place if the European royalty had sat down and talked about the assassination of a minor political figure, rather than square off against one another.
I applaud the current stance taken by Libya. They held secret talks with potential enemies, talks that had to be secret so there was no pressure to deliver. They discussed their problems, and settled on a solution. Some could say they did this because of Iraq, but if this was the case, then Iraq has had a net negative effect on the world. Its a case of the play ground bully making an example of one of his victims. They didnt pay up, you could be next.
If you read the original article and the articles published with it, you may notice something that jumped out at me. It was later made moot by the government giving up the ghost on the injunction, but before they did, they made a claim that "technical" information was different from other forms of speech and therefore not afforded First Amendment rights.
Does this sound vaguely familiar to anyone from a more recent case? Perhaps I'll jog your memory. In the DeCSS case, it was argued that Code is not protected because it has functional value. In effect it is technical rather than political or other speech. In this case, it doesn't seem to be the government making the assertion, rather an organization. But that would be misleading. The DMCA represents a restraint on speech just as broad as the Energy Act used against this article. The identity of the party pushing for the censorship is irrelevant. It's the laws with over broad, sweeping generalizations on what we can, and cannot say, as well as the idea that there is protected and unprotected speech that are truly dangerous. Surely some forms of speech are distasteful in the extreme, and prompt a gut reaction that they should not be allowed. But once you establish a form of speech that is officially "not OK", The worst of your obstructions as a censor are over.
What part of of this is confusing?
"That Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and consult for their common good, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
It's straight forward, black and white. Our nations third grade students can easily understand it. But once you add even ONE exception, however well meaning it might be, the floodgates have opened, and the end result is the muddle we have today. Sufficiently muddled, the citizenry are too afraid to use the rights they might have, for fear of a costly lawsuit, and then they basically don't have those rights. Then we require people like The Progressive, 2600, Penthouse and Lary Flint, and anyone else willing to put their livelihoods and privacy on the line for our freedom.
The base point is this. As soon as something I can personally say out loud becomes Illegal, the whole of my freedom of speech is gone. As soon as something I could sit down and write with my own pen becomes illegal, my freedom of press is gone. Be it technical specifications, computer code, poetry, a political indictment, a story about rape, or a shopping list, If one of those things is illegal, eventually fear will make them all impossible. And once our freedom of speech is gone, Our ability to claim to live in a free society will be a farce.
Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?