Do You Want to Know a Secret thebulwark com do-you-want-to-know-a-secret January 25 2023 An employee stacks servicing records at the Washington National Records Center Suitland Maryland 1940 Photo via Smith Collection Gado Getty Images In the basement of my home I keep a document that reveals a closely guarded secret of Hbomb design The administration of President Jimmy Carter said its disclosure would cause “grave direct immediate and irreparable harm” to the national security of the United States Carter a nuclear engineer by training personally signed off on the effort to keep this secret from being spilled writing at the top of U S Attorney General Griffin Bell’s memo spelling out this intent “Good move proceed J” The document is an article in the November 1979 issue of The Progressive a small iconoclastic national magazine based in Madison Wisconsin It was originally slated to run in the magazine’s May 1979 issue But for six months and 19 days The Progressive was 1 6 forbidden by order of a federal judge from publishing or otherwise “communicating transmitting or disclosing” the article’s contents It was only the second time in U S history that the federal government sought to block publication known as prior restraint on national security grounds the first was in 1971 when the administration of President Richard Nixon sought to suppress the Pentagon Papers In this case an injunction preventing The Progressive from publishing an article by freelance writer Howard Morland was issued by federal Judge Robert W Warren a Nixon appointee He bought the government’s argument calling the article “the recipe for a do-it-yourself hydrogen bomb” and proclaiming “I’d like to think a long hard time before I gave the hydrogen bomb to Idi Amin ” None of this was true Building an H-bomb requires years of work and the investment of many billions of dollars You can’t do it in your garage While Morland a former Air Force pilot did uncover a concept of hydrogen bomb design known as the “Teller-Ulam configuration ” it was hardly a well-kept secret He proved that by uncovering it with no scientific training Other journalists and amateur nuclear sleuths were also able to derive the concept from cursory research after the government’s action to suppress the story became known Erwin Knoll the magazine’s editor told the government he was “incredulous that a writer with Morland’s limited background could so readily penetrate what you are describing as perhaps the most important secret possessed by the United States ” Knoll previously a reporter for the Washington Post had seen often how government officials used claims of secrecy to evade accountability and cover up abuses He took an especially dim view of nuclear secrecy—predicated on the dubious notion that were it not for seditious breaches “they” might not figure out how to build “our” bombs By this time four nations besides the United States had independently mastered this achievement no thanks to the Rosenbergs The lie that the expansion of nuclear weapons depended on access to some sort of secret high-level scientific knowledge was Knoll believed responsible for nearly all of the political repression—the spy scares the witch hunts the loyalty-oath purges—that had stymied progressive change in Cold War America So Knoll and the magazine eagerly accepted the opportunity to directly challenge the nuclear-secrecy mystique As the case played out The Progressive and its lawyers were barred from showing the article to anyone who lacked security clearance making it much more difficult to mount a defense Court filings were stripped of references to other articles that had previously appeared in magazines and encyclopedias Affidavits were submitted on behalf of Knoll and other defendants that they were not allowed to see On the basis of court proceedings they were not permitted to attend decisions were handed down in their case that they were prohibited from reading 2 6 But still the magazine and its supporters were able to sway public opinion mostly to their side In the end the government had to drop its case against The Progressive after the “secret” it was trying to shield was revealed by multiple others—further proof if any were needed that the “restricted data” were not much of a secret Morland’s article is not just in my basement you can read from the magazine’s archive’s here I gave a full account of the H-bomb case in my 1996 book An Enemy of the State The Life of Erwin Knoll for an abbreviated one see “The H-Bomb Case Revisited ” Two decades after writing my book on Erwin I became editor of The Progressive which this month turned 114 years old The story of the H-bomb case has always informed my understanding of debates over the alleged danger to national security posed by the release of purportedly sensitive information Count me as skeptical Obviously there are secrets that the government keeps because it’s a good idea to keep them But how much of what’s classified genuinely needs to be kept secret and how much is classified because the government engages in overclassification “I’ve seen a couple-million pages of documents that were classified when the government put them on paper or computer screens ” wrote Thomas Blanton director of the independent nongovernmental National Security Archive at George Washington University in a 2015 Washington Post op-ed “I can say from experience that few deserved such consideration ” Blanton was responding to the national conniption fit which in some quarters is still going on over Hillary Clinton’s emails According to the always unreliable Donald Trump the Clinton email debacle constituted the greatest threat to national security in the history of the nation— that is at least until it emerged that President Joe Biden committed an even greater breach by having a much smaller number of classified and improperly maintained documents The day before additional classified documents were discovered at Biden’s Delaware residence Trump went berserk “At the very same moment when my ultra-secure Mar-a-Lago home was raided by the FBI Joe Biden was harboring classified documents in his China-funded Penn Center and his unsecured garage ” Trump declared in a January 19 video rant He lamented this situation transpiring “while I’m being persecuted by Trump-hating special counsel—I call them special prosecutors but this one in particular he’s a prosecutor and a Trump-deranged person ” Trump naturally sees Biden’s self-reported misplacement of a small number of classified documents as being vastly more serious than his own months-long campaign to prevent the government from recovering hundreds of pages of documents he improperly acquired As Trump assessed it “The difference is that while I did everything right—I did nothing wrong— Biden did everything wrong ” 3 6 Of course as is often the case when Trump speaks the opposite is true There are many important things we do not yet know about either situation chiefly what was actually in the documents improperly stored by either man and how those documents came to be improperly stored Biden’s nonchalance “There is no ‘there’ there” about the stream of disclosures that he had classified materials lying around various places in his life may be regrettable and even blameworthy But what Trump did sure looks like it’s criminal Trump took records that he knew did not belong to him and proclaimed that they did he falsely claimed that he did not possess them and refused to return them when asked Even if the documents pried from Trump’s possession do not pose a threat to national security he deserves to face criminal charges for his mishandling of the situation and flagrant violation of the Presidential Records Act As Jonathan V Last recently observed “it’s not the documents but the obstruction” for which Trump is in hot water “What we absolutely do know is that Biden’s team appears to have handled the breach by the book ” So it seems has former Vice President Mike Pence in responding to his lawyer’s newly announced discovery of classified documents in his house In contrast “Trump’s team attempted to deceive and obstruct so as to retain possession of the documents ” Blanton in his Washington Post op-ed said “the real secrets make up only a fraction of the classified universe and no secret deserves immortality ” Some secrecy he argued is actually detrimental to national security For instance he noted “the congressional inquiry into 9 11 concluded that secrecy had kept the American people—our best allies in the fight against terrorism—from engaging with the threat they faced ” Agencies with information about the danger of this sort of potential attack failed to share it with each other Some secrecy stems from the desire of agencies and officials to avoid being embarrassed by revelations about their own actions This was certainly the case with the Pentagon Papers as Erwin N Griswold the U S solicitor general who led the Nixon administration’s efforts to block their publication eventually admitted In a 1989 piece in the Post Griswold acknowledged that “there is massive overclassification and that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security but rather with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another ” He went on to say There may be some basis for short-term classification while plans are being made or negotiations are going on but apart from details of weapons systems there is very rarely any real risk to current national security from the publication of facts relating to transactions in the past even the fairly recent past 4 6 Blanton in an interview with CNN last September said his group the National Security Archive estimates that 70 to 80 percent of material deemed classified is overclassified “meaning most of what the government classifies could be released in very short order ” For instance he said the 22 “Top Secret” emails said to be on Hillary Clinton’s email server “all turned out to be New York Times stories that have been forwarded to her by her staff that were about drone strikes in places like Pakistan and the controversies around them ” But when asked by CNN whether the documents retrieved by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago were maybe “just a bunch of New York Times stories ” Blanton said “I doubt it ” explaining that “those cover pages being marked in garish yellow and red” is “a screaming signal that this is really sensitive ” Regardless of how sensitive this information is or isn’t it was not Trump’s to keep Blanton expresses his disgust over how the former president treated these documents “almost as souvenirs ” proclaiming them to be his own property Blanton’s rejoinder “Well they’re not They’re the U S government’s property the American people’s property You didn’t have a right to them ” That is the essence and nature of Trump’s crime Not that he possessed information that could pose a threat to national security but because in his vast carelessness it would not matter to him if he did One reason so much information ends up being classified is that it literally is born that way As the New York Times reported in 2016 all of the 113 Clinton emails determined to have classified information fell into a category of records known as “born classified” because of how they were obtained or generated not based on an assessment of how sensitive they were The designation for being born secret traces to the 1946 Atomic Energy Act which established that all information regarding the development of nuclear weapons is automatically classified at the moment of its creation The act has since been expanded to include other issues It was this act that the federal government invoked in its 1979 attempt to block The Progressive from publishing “The H-bomb Secret How We Got It Why We’re Telling It ” But Morland’s article was not flagged because it fell into a certain category It was determined to be on considered reflection among the most highly classified and dangerous information that could possibly get out And yet it wasn’t 5 6 Since the article was published several more nations have joined the nuclear club with no help from Howard Morland A recent chart in Time magazine citing information from the Federation of American Scientists gave the “current count” of nuclear warheads as being Russia with 4 477 and the United States with 3 708 Here are the seven remaining nuclear countries China 350 France 290 United Kingdom 180 Pakistan 165 India 160 Israel 90 and North Korea 20 A study released last August by scientists at Rutgers University found that even a limited exchange between nuclear nations using less than 3 percent of the world’s arsenal could kill a third of the world’s population within two years A larger confrontation between the United States and Russia could lead to the starvation of three-quarters of the world’s population— while threatening the lives of virtually everyone in both countries by destroying agricultural capacity and contaminating water sources—in the same amount of time It’s possible something on a piece of paper in my basement or Hillary Clinton’s emails or Donald Trump’s closet or Joe Biden’s garage or Mike Pence’s house is going to make these weapons appreciably more dangerous But I doubt it Bill Lueders Bill Lueders former editor and now editor-at-large of The Progressive is a writer in Madison Wisconsin 6 6