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United States v. Progressive, Inc.

United States of America v. Progressive, Inc., Erwin Knoll, Samuel Day, Jr., and Howard Morland, 467 F. Supp. 990 (W.D. Wis. 1979),[1] was a lawsuit brought against The Progressive magazine by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) in 1979. A temporary injunction was granted against The Progressive to prevent the publication of an article written by activist Howard Morland that purported to reveal the "secret" of the hydrogen bomb. Though the information had been compiled from publicly available sources, the DOE claimed that it fell under the "born secret" clause of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.

United States of America v. Progressive, Inc.
Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
CourtUnited States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin (after the Western District judge recused himself)
Full case nameUnited States of America v. Progressive, Inc., Erwin Knoll, Samuel Day, Jr., and Howard Morland.
DecidedMarch 28, 1979
Citation(s)467 F. Supp. 990 (W.D. Wis. 1979)
Court membership
Judge(s) sittingRobert W. Warren

Although the case was filed in the Western District of Wisconsin, the judge there recused himself as a friend of the magazine. The case was therefore brought before Judge Robert W. Warren, a judge in the Eastern District of Wisconsin. Because of the sensitive nature of information at stake in the trial, two separate hearings were conducted, one in public, and the other in camera. The defendants, Morland and the editors of The Progressive, would not accept security clearances, as they would have had to sign non-disclosure agreements that would have put restraints on their free speech (including, significantly, in written form), and so were not present at the in camera hearings. Their lawyers did obtain clearances so that they could participate, but were forbidden from conveying anything they heard there to their clients.

The article was eventually published after the government lawyers dropped their case during the appeals process, calling it moot after other information was independently published. Despite its indecisive conclusion, law students still study the case, which "could have been a law school hypothetical designed to test the limits of the presumption of unconstitutionality attached to prior restraints".[2]

Background edit

Secrecy and disclosure edit

The first atomic bombs were developed by the wartime Manhattan Project. This was carried out in secret, lest its discovery induce the Axis powers, particularly Germany, to accelerate their own nuclear projects, or undertake covert operations against the project.[3] The military and scientific leaders of the Manhattan Project anticipated a need to release details of their wartime accomplishments, principally as a form of recognition for the participants who had labored in secrecy. Press releases were prepared in advance of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and an official account, known as the Smyth Report after its author, the physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth, was commissioned in April 1944 to provide a history of the project for public release.[4] The Director of the Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie Groves, his scientific adviser, Richard Tolman, and Smyth agreed that information could be publicly released if it was essential for an understanding of the project, or was already generally known or deducible, or had no significance to the production of atomic bombs.[5] The first copies went on sale on August 12, 1945.[6]

In its October 8, 1945, issue, The New Republic took the position, emphasized with italics, that "there is no secret to be kept":[7] the knowledge of how to build an atomic bomb had been "the common property of scientists throughout the world for the last five years".[7] President Harry S. Truman took a similar line in his first speech to Congress on nuclear matters that month, proclaiming that "the essential theoretical knowledge upon which the discovery is based is already widely known."[7] In November 1945, Groves instructed Tolman to draw up a policy for the declassification of the Manhattan Project's documents. Tolman assembled a committee, which took a list of the Manhattan Project's activities and assigned each a classification. Four reviewers assessed the documents and declassified about 500 of them by the end of the year.[8]

Atomic Energy Act edit

 
President Harry S. Truman signs the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 establishing the United States Atomic Energy Commission

If there was no secret, then there was no reason for security. The scientists, in particular, chafed under the wartime controls, which were not lifted with the surrender of Japan. On September 1, 1945, Samuel K. Allison used the occasion of the announcement of the founding of the Institute for Nuclear Studies to call for freedom to research and develop atomic energy. He told the press that if controls were not removed, nuclear scientists might turn to the study of the color of butterfly wings. Enrico Fermi warned that "unless research is free and outside of control, the United States will lose its superiority in scientific pursuit".[9]

The War Department envisaged that the Manhattan Project would be superseded by a statutory authority. Legislation to create it was drafted by two War Department lawyers, Kenneth C. Royall and William L. Marbury.[10] Their draft bill ran into strong opposition, particularly from the influential Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg.[11] On December 20, 1945, Senator Brien McMahon introduced an alternative bill on atomic energy, which quickly became known as the McMahon bill. This was initially a very liberal bill towards the control of scientific research, and was broadly supported by scientists. McMahon framed the controversy as a question of military versus civilian control of atomic energy, although the May-Johnson bill also provided for civilian control.[12] Section 10 assigned the patent for any invention related to atomic energy to the commission.[13]

While the bill was being debated, the news broke on February 16, 1946, of the defection of Igor Gouzenko in Canada, and the subsequent arrest of 22 people. The members of Congress debating the bill feared that "atomic secrets" were being systematically stolen by Soviet atomic spies. McMahon convened an executive session at which Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover, Secretary of State James F. Byrnes and Groves were called to appear. Groves revealed that the British physicist Alan Nunn May had passed information about the Manhattan Project to Soviet agents.[14] The more conservative elements in Congress now moved to toughen the act. Section 10, which was formerly titled "Dissemination of Information", now became "Control of Information".[15] Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas, who sponsored the McMahon bill in the House,[16] vigorously defended the section against counterarguments. She dismissed objections that it would "give away the secret of the bomb",[17] asserting that America's advantage in nuclear weapons could only be temporary, whereas the bill could perpetuate the U.S. lead in scientific research.[17] Truman signed the compromise bill into law as the Atomic Energy Act of 1946. It established the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) as the controlling body for atomic energy.[12]

Hydrogen bomb edit

The Manhattan Project had been a crash program to produce a nuclear weapon. Along the way, promising ideas had been set aside. Norris Bradbury, who replaced J. Robert Oppenheimer as director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in late 1945, revived such projects in order to entice scientists to remain at, or return to, Los Alamos.[18] One of these projects was the "Super", a nuclear weapon using nuclear fusion, which Edward Teller's F-1 group had worked on under Fermi's direction.[19] The technical problem was figuring out a way to get a fusion reaction to initiate and propagate, which required temperatures attainable only with a fission bomb. The hydrodynamic calculations involved were daunting, and ENIAC was used to run a computer simulation of the Super in December 1945 and January 1946.[20]

The Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, his wife Francoise Ulam, who performed the calculations, and their collaborator, Cornelius Everett, worked on the Super design through 1949. There was no push from the military for the weapon, because the AEC regarded it as too secret to inform either its own Military Liaison Committee or the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project about it.[21] In September 1949, the Soviet Union detonated a nuclear device.[22][23] It fell to Oppenheimer, as chairman of the AEC General Advisory Committee (GAC), to decide whether the United States should develop the Super in response. The Super design used large quantities of tritium, which could only be manufactured in a reactor, and therefore at the expense of plutonium production for smaller weapons,[24] so the GAC advised against it.[25] Nonetheless, Truman approved the Super on January 31, 1950.[26] Because of the secrecy surrounding the decision, accounts published in the 1950s incorrectly portrayed Oppenheimer as obstructing its development on political grounds, and this was a factor in the Oppenheimer security hearing in 1954.[27]

Ulam still only gave the design a "50–50 chance" of success in February 1950.[28] At the end of March, he reported that it would not work at all.[29] Scientists like Hans Bethe and George Gamow felt that Teller had committed the nation to an expensive crash program on the basis of a model that he knew was flawed.[30] However, in February 1951, Ulam had a new idea, in which the shock wave from an atomic bomb "primary" stage, through an arrangement he called "hydrodynamic lensing", would compress a "secondary" stage of deuterium fusion fuel wrapped around a plutonium rod or "spark plug". On being informed, Teller immediately grasped the potential for using the X-rays produced by the primary explosion for hydrodynamic lensing.[31][32] This arrangement, which made thermonuclear weapons possible, is now known as the Teller–Ulam design.[33] Although it was not what Truman had approved, the design did work, and was capable of producing multi-megaton explosions.[34] "Rarely in the history of technology", wrote Howard Morland, "has such a seemingly daunting problem turned out to have such a nifty solution."[35]

In 1950, the Atomic Energy Commission asked Scientific American not to publish an article by Bethe that it claimed revealed classified information about the hydrogen bomb. Scientific American reluctantly agreed to stop the presses and make changes in the article, and to recall and burn the 3,000 copies that had already been printed.[36] The 1951 arrest of Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, David Greenglass, Morton Sobell and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who, according to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, "stole the basic secrets of nuclear fission",[37] caused great concern. President Dwight D. Eisenhower denied the Rosenbergs clemency on the grounds that their actions "could well result in the deaths of many, many thousands of innocent citizens",[38] and they were executed.[39] After the Soviet Union detonated Joe 4 in August 1953, newspapers proclaimed that the Soviets had tested a hydrogen bomb. In fact it was only a boosted fission device, but the veil of secrecy covering the thermonuclear program prevented scientists from informing the public.[40]

Prior restraint edit

Prior restraint has generally been regarded by U.S. courts, particularly the U.S. Supreme Court, as being "the most serious and least tolerable" of restrictions on the First Amendment.[41] The Blackstone Commentaries defined freedom of the press as "laying no previous restraints upon publication, and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published."[42] The Supreme Court had however never held that prior restraint was unconstitutional. On the contrary, in Near v. Minnesota 283 U.S. 697 (1931), Chief Justice Charles E. Hughes remarked that in wartime, "no one would question but that a government might prevent actual obstruction to its recruiting service or the publication of the sailing dates of transports or the number and location of troops."[42] He further suggested that obscenity or incitement to insurrection would be similar grounds for prior restraint. The court subsequently upheld free speech exceptions such as restrictions on demonstrations in Cox v. New Hampshire, 312 U.S. 569 (1941), and censorship of motion pictures in Times Film Corp. v. City of Chicago, 365 U.S. 43 (1961).[42]

In New York Times Co. v. United States 403 U.S. 713 (1971)—better known as the Pentagon Papers case—the government had sought to prevent the publication of classified material by The New York Times. In this case, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that the government had not reached the standard required by Near to justify prior restraint, but the concurring justices gave differing opinions about where the line should be drawn. In his opinion, Justice Potter Stewart wrote that while publication of The Pentagon Papers would likely harm the national interest, it would not result in "direct, immediate or irreparable harm to our Nation or its people".[43] Failure to provide a clear line inevitably meant that the court had to deal with prior restraint on a case-by-case basis. In Nebraska Press Association v. Stuart, 427 U.S. 539 (1976), the court was called upon to decide whether news reportage of a lurid mass murder case in a small town in Nebraska would justify prior restraint in order to protect the defendant's right to a fair trial. In this case, the court ruled unanimously that it would not. Most of the justices viewed Near as providing the only grounds for prior restraint, and declined to expand its scope any further.[44]

Trial edit

Morland's research edit

 
Howard Morland in 2008

The Progressive was a left-wing American monthly magazine of politics, culture and opinion with a circulation of around 40,000. In 1978, its managing editor, Sam Day Jr., a former editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and its editor, Erwin Knoll, commissioned freelance journalist Howard Morland to write an article on the secrecy surrounding nuclear weapons production in America.[45] In October 1978, Morland got Representative Ronald V. Dellums to submit a series of questions about plutonium production to the Department of Energy (DOE), the successor to the AEC.[46] The DOE responded by classifying the questions.[47] In September and October 1978, the House Armed Services Committee held hearings on the proposed Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. There was widespread public ignorance of issues surrounding nuclear weapons, and associated environmental concerns.[48] Day and Morland hoped that by demystifying nuclear weapons, they would promote more critical public debate, and improve the prospects for nuclear disarmament.[49][45] Morland claimed that "I am precisely the type of person the First Amendment was intended to protect: a political advocate whose ideas are unpopular with the general public and threatening to the government."[49]

Over a period of six months, Morland systematically pieced together a design for a hydrogen bomb. He visited a number of nuclear weapons facilities and interviewed government employees, with the permission of the DOE, usually identifying himself and his purpose. He did not have a security clearance, and had never had any access to classified nuclear weapons documents, although it is possible that some classified information or ideas were accidentally or deliberately leaked to him.[50] His scientific background was minimal; he had taken five undergraduate courses in physics and chemistry as part of his Bachelor of Arts degree in economics at Emory University. Morland identified the features of the Teller–Ulam design as staging, with a fission primary and a fusion secondary inside opposite ends of a hollow container, and the use of radiation from the exploding primary to compress, or implode, the secondary.[50][51] "The notion that X-rays could move solid objects with the force of thousands of tons of dynamite," noted Morland, "was beyond the grasp of the science fiction writers of the time."[35]

Day sent draft copies of Morland's article out to reviewers in late 1978 and early 1979, including Ron Siegel, a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Siegel gave his draft copy to George Rathjens, a professor of political science there in February 1979.[52] For many years, Rathjens had issued a challenge to his graduate students to produce a workable design for a hydrogen bomb, but no one had ever succeeded.[53] Rathjens phoned The Progressive and urged that the article not be published. When the editors dismissed his suggestion, he sent the draft to the DOE.[54] "Apparently," wrote Morland, "I had earned a passing grade on the Rathjens challenge".[55]

Legal arguments edit

In March 1979, the editors sent a final draft to the DOE for comment. DOE officials, first in phone calls and then in person, attempted to dissuade The Progressive from publishing the article on the grounds that it contained "secret restricted data" as defined by the Atomic Energy Act. The Progressive's editors were not persuaded, and told the officials that they intended to proceed with publishing Morland's article. The DOE filed a motion to suppress the article with the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin in Madison on March 8, 1979.[54] There was only one judge in the Western District of Wisconsin at the time, Judge James Edward Doyle, but he recused himself as a friend of the magazine. The case was therefore brought before Judge Robert W. Warren, a judge in the Eastern District of Wisconsin, and heard by Warren in Milwaukee.[56][57]

 
The cover of the November 1979 issue of The Progressive, which the United States Department of Energy attempted to censor

Lawyers for The Progressive voluntarily underwent security reviews and were granted Q clearances that allowed them to access restricted nuclear information. Morland and The Progressive's editors declined to obtain clearances, as they would have had to sign non-disclosure agreements that would have prevented them from publishing the article. This resulted in the lawyers being restricted in their communications with their clients.[58]

In seeking a temporary restraining order, government lawyers argued that The Progressive was about to break the law, causing irreparable harm. The data in the article was born classified, so it did not matter that it was an original work of the author. They noted that prior restraint had been upheld by the courts before in matters of national security, and argued that the Pentagon Papers decision did not apply as the Atomic Energy Act specifically allowed for injunctive relief. Moreover, the Pentagon Papers were historical, whereas the hydrogen bomb was a current military weapon. Finally, they pointed out that the government had obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty not to assist non-nuclear states in acquiring nuclear weapons.[59] In granting the temporary restraining order on March 9, Warren said that he would have "to think long and hard before I gave the hydrogen bomb to Idi Amin."[60]

James R. Schlesinger, the Secretary of Energy, telephoned leading newspapers and warned them not to support The Progressive. This was probably unnecessary, for the media were supportive of the government's case. Fred Graham, the New York Times's legal correspondent, predicted that the government would win the case.[61] In an editorial on March 11, 1979, The Washington Post wrote that The Progressive case, "as a press-versus-government First Amendment contest, is John Mitchell's dream case—the one the Nixon Administration was never lucky enough to get: a real First Amendment loser."[62] The newspaper called on The Progressive to "forget about publishing it".[63] In the Pentagon Papers case, Professor Alexander Bickel, an expert on the United States Constitution, when asked hypothetically if prior restraint could ever be justified, had told the court that he would draw the line at the hydrogen bomb.[57] Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers, told Morland that he believed that nuclear weapon designs should be kept secret.[64] Because of the horrific nature of thermonuclear weapons, and the expectation that The Progressive would probably lose the case, mainstream media organizations feared that the result would be an erosion of freedom of the press.[65]

However, the court's role was to rule on whether publication was legal, not whether it was wise.[66] In keeping with the usual practice of keeping a temporary restraining order in effect for as short a time as possible, Warren ordered that hearings be held on a preliminary injunction one week after the March 9 temporary restraining order. On March 16, the Progressive's attorneys filed an affidavit from Theodore Postol, an employee of the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, stating that the information contained in the Morland article could be derived by any competent physicist from Teller's article on the hydrogen bomb in the Encyclopedia Americana.[67] At the request of both parties, the hearing was postponed to March 26 so they would have more time to file their briefs and affidavits.[68] The parties were therefore back in court again on March 26 for a hearing on the government's request for a preliminary injunction. Warren decided not to hold an evidentiary hearing at which the opposing teams of experts could be cross examined. He also declined a suggestion by the Federation of American Scientists in its amicus curiae brief that a panel of experts be charged with examining the issue. The case relied on written affidavits and briefs, and the opposing counsels' oral arguments.[69]

Testimony was introduced entirely in the form of sworn affidavits, the most important of which were deemed classified and presented to the court in camera. The government affiants included classification officers, weapon lab scientists, the Secretaries of Energy, State, and Defense, and Nobel physics laureate Hans Bethe, whom Judge Warren cited as the star witness for the plaintiff.[70] The defense side had no experts with direct knowledge of nuclear weapon design, until the unexpected appearance of Ray Kidder, a nuclear weapon designer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. One of Kidder's jobs in 1962 had been to evaluate designs of the 29 thermonuclear devices tested in Operation Dominic.[71] Kidder was able to credibly dispute government arguments in the battle of affidavits, leveling the technical playing field. Because of the importance of radiation implosion in civilian fusion research, Kidder had been quietly waging a campaign to declassify it for some years prior to the Progressive case.[72]

The Progressive's legal team argued that the government had not established a case sufficient "to overcome the First Amendment's presumption against prior restraint". The article was based upon information in the public domain, and was therefore neither a threat to national security nor covered by the Atomic Energy Act, which in any case did not authorize prior restraint, or was unconstitutional if it did. In this, counsel relied on the United States v. Heine decision, in which Judge Learned Hand ruled that information in the public domain could not be covered by the Espionage Act of 1917.[73] The government's lawyers argued, on the contrary, that there was sensitive information in the article, which was not in the public domain, and which, if published, would harm arms control efforts.[56]

In attempting to apply the Near and Pentagon Papers standards, the court was concerned about the prospect of publication causing the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and potentially a global nuclear holocaust. The government did not go so far as to claim that publication might pose an immediate or inevitable danger, only that it "would substantially increase the risk that thermonuclear weapons would become available or available at an earlier date to those who do not now have them. If this should occur, it would undermine our nonproliferation policy, irreparably impair the national security of the United States, and pose a threat to the peace and security of the world."[74] However, the court still found that "a mistake in ruling against the United States could pave the way for thermonuclear annihilation for us all. In that event, our right to life is extinguished and the right to publish becomes moot",[68] and that publication could indeed cause "grave, direct, immediate and irreparable harm to the United States",[68] thereby meeting the test the Supreme Court had enunciated in the Pentagon Papers case. The preliminary injunction was therefore granted.[68]

Lawyers for The Progressive filed a motion to vacate the decision on the grounds that the information contained in Morland's article was already in the public domain. The basis for this claim was two reports from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory UCRL-4725, "Weapons Development During June 1956", and UCRL-5280, "Weapons Development During June 1958", which contained detailed information on thermonuclear weapon design.[75] One of them, UCRL-4725, gave details about Bassoon, a three-stage thermonuclear device tested during Operation Redwing in 1956.[76] It was found on the shelves of the Los Alamos library by Dmitri Rotow, a researcher for the American Civil Liberties Union. According to the government, the reports had been inadvertently declassified. On June 15, Warren therefore denied the motion on the grounds that such an error did not place the documents in the public domain.[77] The appellants immediately appealed to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, claiming that the two documents had been on the shelves for a considerable period of time.[78] The government now advanced the argument that "technical data" was not protected by the First Amendment.[79] The motions for an expedited review were denied because the magazine's lawyers had waived that right—something Morland and The Progressive editors discovered only from the court. The preliminary injunction therefore remained in effect for six months.[80]

Case dropped edit

On April 25, 1979, a group of scientists who worked at the Argonne National Laboratory wrote to Senator John Glenn, the Chairman of the United States Senate Subcommittee on Energy, Nuclear Proliferation and Federal Services. They were concerned about information being leaked, in particular by the government's tacit acknowledgement that Morland's bomb design was substantially correct, something that could not otherwise have been deduced from unclassified information.[81] These included the affidavits by the United States Secretary of Defense Harold Brown and government expert witness Jack Rosengren.[82] Copies of the letter were sent to major newspapers, but with a cover note explaining that it was for background information and not publication. After about four weeks, the Glenn subcommittee forwarded it to the DOE, which classified it.[83]

Unaware of this, Hugh DeWitt, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons laboratory, forwarded a copy to Chuck Hansen.[83] Hansen was a computer programmer from Mountain View, California, who collected information about nuclear weapons as a hobby. He had run a competition to design an H-bomb, the winner of which would be the first person to have their design classified by the DOE. It now began to occur to him that his hobby might not be legal. On August 27, he wrote a letter to Senator Charles H. Percy detailing how much information he had deduced from publicly available sources. This included his own design, one not as good as Morland's, which Hansen had not seen. Hansen further charged that government scientists—including Edward Teller, Ted Taylor, and George Rathjens—had leaked sensitive information about thermonuclear weapons, for which no action had been taken. In this, Hansen was mistaken: Taylor had indeed been reprimanded, and Teller was not the source of the information that Hansen attributed to him. Hansen made copies of his letter available to several newspapers.[84]

When The Daily Californian (the student-run college newspaper of the University of California at Berkeley), published excerpts from the Argonne letter on June 11, the DOE obtained a court order to prevent further publication. Undeterred, The Daily Californian published the Argonne letter in its entirety on June 13.[85] In September, the DOE declared the Hansen letter to be classified and obtained a temporary restraining order prohibiting The Daily Californian from publishing it,[86] but the Hansen letter was published by the Madison Press Connection on September 16.[84] The government then moved to dismiss their cases against both The Progressive and The Daily Californian as moot.[80]

Legacy edit

Morland's article was published in the November 1979 issue of The Progressive. A month later he published an erratum in The Progressive with updates based on information that he had gathered during the trial from UCRL-4725, Chuck Hansen's letter and other sources. In Morland's opinion, the article contributed to a wave of anti-nuclear activism in the late 1970s and early 1980s that resulted in, amongst other things, the closure of the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver.[87] Chuck Hansen went on to publish a book, U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History, in 1988. This was subsequently expanded to a self-published five volume work entitled Swords of Armageddon.[88] However, many mainstream media organizations still remained reluctant to test the law by publishing.[65] On September 30, 1980, the Justice Department issued a statement that it would not prosecute alleged violations of the Atomic Energy Act during the Daily Californian or The Progressive cases.[89]

Hearings on the case were held by Glenn's subcommittee and by the House Subcommittee on Government Information and Individual Rights. The subcommittees looked into the implications of the decision with regards to nuclear proliferation. They also examined the doctrine of "classified at birth", but did not decide to amend the Atomic Energy Act to remove such provisions.[90] Thus far, fears of thermonuclear proliferation have not proven founded; whether any country has successfully developed a hydrogen bomb since 1979 is disputed.[91]

From a legal standpoint, the case "proved to be a victory for no one",[65] due to the indecisive nature of its conclusion.[65] Yet it remains a celebrated case nonetheless. In 2004, the 25th anniversary of the decision was commemorated with an academic conference at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, attended by many of the participants, at which papers were presented.[92] Law students still study the case, which "could have been a law school hypothetical designed to test the limits of the presumption of unconstitutionality attached to prior restraints."[2]

Notes edit

  1. ^ United States v. Progressive, Inc., 467 F. Supp. 990 (W.D. Wis. 1979).
  2. ^ a b Linder 2012.
  3. ^ Jones 1985, pp. 253–255.
  4. ^ Jones 1985, pp. 553–557.
  5. ^ Jones 1985, pp. 558–559.
  6. ^ Jones 1985, p. 561.
  7. ^ a b c Kaiser 2005, p. 192.
  8. ^ Hewlett & Anderson 1962, p. 647.
  9. ^ Hewlett & Anderson 1962, p. 422.
  10. ^ Jones 1985, pp. 574–575.
  11. ^ Hewlett & Anderson 1962, p. 429.
  12. ^ a b Jones 1985, pp. 576–578.
  13. ^ Hewlett & Anderson 1962, p. 495.
  14. ^ Hewlett & Anderson 1962, p. 501.
  15. ^ Hewlett & Anderson 1962, p. 512.
  16. ^ Hewlett & Anderson 1962, p. 510.
  17. ^ a b Hewlett & Anderson 1962, p. 524.
  18. ^ Fitzpatrick 1999, pp. 83–88.
  19. ^ Fitzpatrick 1999, pp. 113–118.
  20. ^ Fitzpatrick 1999, pp. 120–121.
  21. ^ Fitzpatrick 1999, pp. 290–291.
  22. ^ Fitzpatrick 1999, pp. 259–260.
  23. ^ Hewlett & Duncan 1969, p. 369.
  24. ^ Hewlett & Duncan 1969, pp. 372–373.
  25. ^ Hewlett & Duncan 1969, pp. 382–383.
  26. ^ Hewlett & Duncan 1969, pp. 406–409.
  27. ^ Fitzpatrick 1999, p. 14.
  28. ^ Hewlett & Duncan 1969, p. 439.
  29. ^ Hewlett & Duncan 1969, p. 440.
  30. ^ Rhodes 1995, pp. 460–461.
  31. ^ Rhodes 1995, pp. 461–463.
  32. ^ Hewlett & Duncan 1969, pp. 438–441.
  33. ^ Fitzpatrick 1999, p. 25.
  34. ^ Morland 2005a, pp. 1405–1406.
  35. ^ a b Morland 2005a, p. 1405.
  36. ^ DeVolpi et al. 1981, pp. 135–136.
  37. ^ Kaiser 2005, pp. 198–202.
  38. ^ Hewlett & Holl 1989, p. 40.
  39. ^ Rhodes 1995, p. 533.
  40. ^ Hewlett & Holl 1989, p. 59.
  41. ^ Entin 1980, p. 538.
  42. ^ a b c Entin 1980, p. 539.
  43. ^ Entin 1980, p. 546.
  44. ^ Entin 1980, pp. 547–549.
  45. ^ a b DeVolpi et al. 1981, p. 3.
  46. ^ Morland 1981, pp. 106–109.
  47. ^ Morland 1979, pp. 3–4.
  48. ^ DeVolpi et al. 1981, pp. 44–48.
  49. ^ a b Morland 2005b, p. 1366.
  50. ^ a b Entin 1980, p. 542.
  51. ^ Morland 2005b, pp. 1366–1377.
  52. ^ DeVolpi et al. 1981, pp. 4–6.
  53. ^ Morland 2005b, p. 1370.
  54. ^ a b DeVolpi et al. 1981, pp. 5–6.
  55. ^ Morland 2005b, p. 1373.
  56. ^ a b Tuerkheimer 2005, p. 1362.
  57. ^ a b Powe 1990, p. 55.
  58. ^ Williamson 2005, p. 1360.
  59. ^ DeVolpi et al. 1981, pp. 59–61.
  60. ^ DeVolpi et al. 1981, p. 61.
  61. ^ Knoll 1994, pp. 711–712.
  62. ^ Schlesinger 2005, p. 1346.
  63. ^ "John Mitchell's Dream Case". The Washington Post. March 11, 1979. p. C6. Retrieved March 24, 2012.
  64. ^ Powe 1990, p. 57.
  65. ^ a b c d DeVolpi et al. 1981, p. 216.
  66. ^ Entin 1980, p. 569.
  67. ^ Pincus, Walter (March 18, 1979). "Bomb Article Said Less Useful Than Encyclopedia". The Washington Post. Retrieved May 10, 2018.
  68. ^ a b c d . University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School. Archived from the original on December 3, 2010. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
  69. ^ Entin 1980, p. 543.
  70. ^ Morland 1981, p. 185.
  71. ^ Kidder 2005.
  72. ^ Bethe & Kidder 2002.
  73. ^ DeVolpi et al. 1981, p. 63.
  74. ^ Entin 1980, p. 551.
  75. ^ De Geer 1991, p. 354.
  76. ^ Morland 2005a, p. 1375.
  77. ^ United States v. Progressive, Inc., 486 F. Supp. 5 (W.D. Wis. 1979).
  78. ^ United States v. Progressive, Inc., 610 F.2d 819 (7th Cir. 1979).
  79. ^ DeVolpi et al. 1981, pp. 74–78.
  80. ^ a b Entin 1980, pp. 540–541.
  81. ^ DeVolpi et al. 1981, pp. 7–8, 256–257.
  82. ^ DeVolpi et al. 1981, pp. 172–173, 180–181.
  83. ^ a b DeVolpi et al. 1981, pp. 7, 181–182.
  84. ^ a b DeVolpi et al. 1981, pp. 8, 171–172, 182–183.
  85. ^ DeVolpi et al. 1981, pp. 14, 113, 178–179, 278-280 (pdf pages).
  86. ^ Morland 1981, pp. 223, 226.
  87. ^ Morland 2005a, pp. 1375–1376.
  88. ^ Morland, Howard (1999). "The Holocaust Bomb: a Question of Time". Federation of American Scientists. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
  89. ^ DeVolpi et al. 1981, p. 9.
  90. ^ DeVolpi et al. 1981, pp. 214–215.
  91. ^ Easterbrook, Gregg (January 4, 2004). "Ideas & Trends: The Atomic Club; If the Bomb Is So Easy to Make, Why Don't More Nations Have It?". New York Times. Retrieved March 2, 2013.
  92. ^ Rudenstine 2005, p. 1337.

References edit

  • Bethe, Hans; Kidder, Ray (October 2002), The 1979 Bethe - Kidder Correspondence, Federation of American Scientists, retrieved August 16, 2016
  • De Geer, Lars-Erik (1991). "The Radioactive Signature of the Hydrogen Bomb" (PDF). Science & Global Security. 2 (4): 351–363. Bibcode:1991S&GS....2..351D. doi:10.1080/08929889108426372. ISSN 1547-7800. Retrieved August 24, 2012.
  • DeVolpi, A.; Marsh, Gerald E.; Postol, T. A.; Stanford, G. S. (1981). Born Secret: The H-Bomb, the Progressive Case and National Security (PDF). New York: Pergamon Press. ISBN 0-08-025995-2. OCLC 7197387.
  • Entin, Jonathan L. (1980). "United States v. Progressive, Inc.: The Faustian Bargain and the First Amendment". Northwestern University Law Review. 75 (3): 538–569. ISSN 0029-3571.
  • Fitzpatrick, Anne (1999). Igniting the Light Elements: The Los Alamos Thermonuclear Weapon Project, 1942–1952 (PDF) (PhD). Virginia Polytechnic Institute. LA-13577-T. Retrieved March 16, 2012.
  • Hewlett, Richard G.; Anderson, Oscar E. (1962). The New World, 1939–1946. A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0-520-07186-7.
  • —; Duncan, Francis (1969). Atomic Shield, Volume II, 1947–1952. A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0-520-07187-5. OCLC 3717478.
  • —; Holl, Jack M. (1989). Atoms for Peace and War, Volume III, 1953–1961 Eisenhower and the Atomic Energy Commission. A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0-520-06018-0. OCLC 82275622.
  • Jones, Vincent (1985). Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb. Washington, D.C.: United States Army Center of Military History. OCLC 10913875.
  • Kaiser, David (2005). "The Atomic Secret in Red Hands? American Suspicions of Theoretical Physicists during the Cold War". In Carson, Cathryn; Hollinger, David A (eds.). Reappraising Oppenheimer: Centennial Studies and Reflections. Berkeley, California: Office for History of Science and Technology, University of California. pp. 185–216. ISBN 0-9672617-3-2. OCLC 64385611.
  • Kidder, Ray (March 2005). "Weapons of Mass Destruction, National Security, and a Free Press". Cardozo Law Review. 26 (4): 1389–1399.
  • Knoll, Erwin (1994). "The H-Bomb and the First Amendment". William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal. 3 (2): 705–714. ISSN 1065-8254.
  • Linder, Doug (2012). "Prior Restraints and the Presumption of Unconstitutionality". University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School. Retrieved March 6, 2013.
  • Morland, Howard (November 1979). "The H-Bomb Secret: To Know is to Ask Why". The Progressive: 3–12. ISSN 0033-0736. Retrieved March 4, 2012.
  • — (1981). The Secret that Exploded. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0394512976.
  • — (2005a). "The Article". Cardozo Law Review. 26 (4): 1366–1378. ISSN 0270-5192. Retrieved March 4, 2012.
  • — (2005b). "Born Secret" (PDF). Cardozo Law Review. 26 (4): 1401–1408. ISSN 0270-5192. Retrieved March 4, 2012.
  • Powe, Lucas A. (1990). "The H-Bomb Injunction". University of Colorado Law Review. 61: 55–79. ISSN 0041-9516.
  • Rhodes, Richard (1995). Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-684-80400-X. OCLC 32509950.
  • Rudenstine, David (March 2005). "Welcome". Cardozo Law Review. 26 (4): 1337–1342. ISSN 0270-5192. Retrieved March 4, 2012.
  • Schlesinger, James R. (March 2005). "Transcript of Weapons of Mass Destruction, National Security and a Free Press: Seminal Issues as Viewed Through the Lens of the Progressive Case: Context". Cardozo Law Review. 26 (4): 1342–1352. ISSN 0270-5192.
  • Tuerkheimer, Frank (March 2005). "Transcript of Weapons of Mass Destruction, National Security and a Free Press: Seminal Issues as Viewed Through the Lens of the Progressive Case: The Case". Cardozo Law Review. 26 (4): 1362–1366. ISSN 0270-5192.
  • Williamson, Brady (March 2005). "Transcript of Weapons of Mass Destruction, National Security and a Free Press: Seminal Issues as Viewed Through the Lens of the Progressive Case: The Case". Cardozo Law Review. 26 (4): 1358–1361. ISSN 0270-5192.

External links edit

  • Telford, Thomas L.; Herbeck, Dale A. "United States v. Progressive, Inc. (Text of the decision)". . Boston: Boston College. Archived from the original on January 15, 2013. Retrieved March 4, 2012.
  • "The H-Bomb Secret: How we got it, why we're telling it". The Progressive, November 1979 [entire issue online]. Retrieved March 4, 2012.
  • . Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Archived from the original on May 10, 2013. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
  • . University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School. Archived from the original on December 3, 2010. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
  • Morland, Howard. "The Holocaust Bomb: A Question of Time". Federation of American Scientists. Retrieved January 12, 2013.

united, states, progressive, united, states, america, progressive, erwin, knoll, samuel, howard, morland, supp, 1979, lawsuit, brought, against, progressive, magazine, united, states, department, energy, 1979, temporary, injunction, granted, against, progressi. United States of America v Progressive Inc Erwin Knoll Samuel Day Jr and Howard Morland 467 F Supp 990 W D Wis 1979 1 was a lawsuit brought against The Progressive magazine by the United States Department of Energy DOE in 1979 A temporary injunction was granted against The Progressive to prevent the publication of an article written by activist Howard Morland that purported to reveal the secret of the hydrogen bomb Though the information had been compiled from publicly available sources the DOE claimed that it fell under the born secret clause of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 United States of America v Progressive Inc Federal Building and U S Courthouse Milwaukee WisconsinCourtUnited States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin after the Western District judge recused himself Full case nameUnited States of America v Progressive Inc Erwin Knoll Samuel Day Jr and Howard Morland DecidedMarch 28 1979Citation s 467 F Supp 990 W D Wis 1979 Court membershipJudge s sittingRobert W WarrenAlthough the case was filed in the Western District of Wisconsin the judge there recused himself as a friend of the magazine The case was therefore brought before Judge Robert W Warren a judge in the Eastern District of Wisconsin Because of the sensitive nature of information at stake in the trial two separate hearings were conducted one in public and the other in camera The defendants Morland and the editors of The Progressive would not accept security clearances as they would have had to sign non disclosure agreements that would have put restraints on their free speech including significantly in written form and so were not present at the in camera hearings Their lawyers did obtain clearances so that they could participate but were forbidden from conveying anything they heard there to their clients The article was eventually published after the government lawyers dropped their case during the appeals process calling it moot after other information was independently published Despite its indecisive conclusion law students still study the case which could have been a law school hypothetical designed to test the limits of the presumption of unconstitutionality attached to prior restraints 2 Contents 1 Background 1 1 Secrecy and disclosure 1 2 Atomic Energy Act 1 3 Hydrogen bomb 1 4 Prior restraint 2 Trial 2 1 Morland s research 2 2 Legal arguments 2 3 Case dropped 3 Legacy 4 Notes 5 References 6 External linksBackground editSecrecy and disclosure edit The first atomic bombs were developed by the wartime Manhattan Project This was carried out in secret lest its discovery induce the Axis powers particularly Germany to accelerate their own nuclear projects or undertake covert operations against the project 3 The military and scientific leaders of the Manhattan Project anticipated a need to release details of their wartime accomplishments principally as a form of recognition for the participants who had labored in secrecy Press releases were prepared in advance of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and an official account known as the Smyth Report after its author the physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth was commissioned in April 1944 to provide a history of the project for public release 4 The Director of the Manhattan Project Major General Leslie Groves his scientific adviser Richard Tolman and Smyth agreed that information could be publicly released if it was essential for an understanding of the project or was already generally known or deducible or had no significance to the production of atomic bombs 5 The first copies went on sale on August 12 1945 6 In its October 8 1945 issue The New Republic took the position emphasized with italics that there is no secret to be kept 7 the knowledge of how to build an atomic bomb had been the common property of scientists throughout the world for the last five years 7 President Harry S Truman took a similar line in his first speech to Congress on nuclear matters that month proclaiming that the essential theoretical knowledge upon which the discovery is based is already widely known 7 In November 1945 Groves instructed Tolman to draw up a policy for the declassification of the Manhattan Project s documents Tolman assembled a committee which took a list of the Manhattan Project s activities and assigned each a classification Four reviewers assessed the documents and declassified about 500 of them by the end of the year 8 Atomic Energy Act edit Further information Atomic Energy Act of 1946 nbsp President Harry S Truman signs the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 establishing the United States Atomic Energy CommissionIf there was no secret then there was no reason for security The scientists in particular chafed under the wartime controls which were not lifted with the surrender of Japan On September 1 1945 Samuel K Allison used the occasion of the announcement of the founding of the Institute for Nuclear Studies to call for freedom to research and develop atomic energy He told the press that if controls were not removed nuclear scientists might turn to the study of the color of butterfly wings Enrico Fermi warned that unless research is free and outside of control the United States will lose its superiority in scientific pursuit 9 The War Department envisaged that the Manhattan Project would be superseded by a statutory authority Legislation to create it was drafted by two War Department lawyers Kenneth C Royall and William L Marbury 10 Their draft bill ran into strong opposition particularly from the influential Senator Arthur H Vandenberg 11 On December 20 1945 Senator Brien McMahon introduced an alternative bill on atomic energy which quickly became known as the McMahon bill This was initially a very liberal bill towards the control of scientific research and was broadly supported by scientists McMahon framed the controversy as a question of military versus civilian control of atomic energy although the May Johnson bill also provided for civilian control 12 Section 10 assigned the patent for any invention related to atomic energy to the commission 13 While the bill was being debated the news broke on February 16 1946 of the defection of Igor Gouzenko in Canada and the subsequent arrest of 22 people The members of Congress debating the bill feared that atomic secrets were being systematically stolen by Soviet atomic spies McMahon convened an executive session at which Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J Edgar Hoover Secretary of State James F Byrnes and Groves were called to appear Groves revealed that the British physicist Alan Nunn May had passed information about the Manhattan Project to Soviet agents 14 The more conservative elements in Congress now moved to toughen the act Section 10 which was formerly titled Dissemination of Information now became Control of Information 15 Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas who sponsored the McMahon bill in the House 16 vigorously defended the section against counterarguments She dismissed objections that it would give away the secret of the bomb 17 asserting that America s advantage in nuclear weapons could only be temporary whereas the bill could perpetuate the U S lead in scientific research 17 Truman signed the compromise bill into law as the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 It established the Atomic Energy Commission AEC as the controlling body for atomic energy 12 Hydrogen bomb edit Further information History of the Teller Ulam design The Manhattan Project had been a crash program to produce a nuclear weapon Along the way promising ideas had been set aside Norris Bradbury who replaced J Robert Oppenheimer as director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in late 1945 revived such projects in order to entice scientists to remain at or return to Los Alamos 18 One of these projects was the Super a nuclear weapon using nuclear fusion which Edward Teller s F 1 group had worked on under Fermi s direction 19 The technical problem was figuring out a way to get a fusion reaction to initiate and propagate which required temperatures attainable only with a fission bomb The hydrodynamic calculations involved were daunting and ENIAC was used to run a computer simulation of the Super in December 1945 and January 1946 20 The Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam his wife Francoise Ulam who performed the calculations and their collaborator Cornelius Everett worked on the Super design through 1949 There was no push from the military for the weapon because the AEC regarded it as too secret to inform either its own Military Liaison Committee or the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project about it 21 In September 1949 the Soviet Union detonated a nuclear device 22 23 It fell to Oppenheimer as chairman of the AEC General Advisory Committee GAC to decide whether the United States should develop the Super in response The Super design used large quantities of tritium which could only be manufactured in a reactor and therefore at the expense of plutonium production for smaller weapons 24 so the GAC advised against it 25 Nonetheless Truman approved the Super on January 31 1950 26 Because of the secrecy surrounding the decision accounts published in the 1950s incorrectly portrayed Oppenheimer as obstructing its development on political grounds and this was a factor in the Oppenheimer security hearing in 1954 27 Ulam still only gave the design a 50 50 chance of success in February 1950 28 At the end of March he reported that it would not work at all 29 Scientists like Hans Bethe and George Gamow felt that Teller had committed the nation to an expensive crash program on the basis of a model that he knew was flawed 30 However in February 1951 Ulam had a new idea in which the shock wave from an atomic bomb primary stage through an arrangement he called hydrodynamic lensing would compress a secondary stage of deuterium fusion fuel wrapped around a plutonium rod or spark plug On being informed Teller immediately grasped the potential for using the X rays produced by the primary explosion for hydrodynamic lensing 31 32 This arrangement which made thermonuclear weapons possible is now known as the Teller Ulam design 33 Although it was not what Truman had approved the design did work and was capable of producing multi megaton explosions 34 Rarely in the history of technology wrote Howard Morland has such a seemingly daunting problem turned out to have such a nifty solution 35 In 1950 the Atomic Energy Commission asked Scientific American not to publish an article by Bethe that it claimed revealed classified information about the hydrogen bomb Scientific American reluctantly agreed to stop the presses and make changes in the article and to recall and burn the 3 000 copies that had already been printed 36 The 1951 arrest of Klaus Fuchs Harry Gold David Greenglass Morton Sobell and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who according to FBI Director J Edgar Hoover stole the basic secrets of nuclear fission 37 caused great concern President Dwight D Eisenhower denied the Rosenbergs clemency on the grounds that their actions could well result in the deaths of many many thousands of innocent citizens 38 and they were executed 39 After the Soviet Union detonated Joe 4 in August 1953 newspapers proclaimed that the Soviets had tested a hydrogen bomb In fact it was only a boosted fission device but the veil of secrecy covering the thermonuclear program prevented scientists from informing the public 40 Prior restraint edit Main article Prior restraint Prior restraint has generally been regarded by U S courts particularly the U S Supreme Court as being the most serious and least tolerable of restrictions on the First Amendment 41 The Blackstone Commentaries defined freedom of the press as laying no previous restraints upon publication and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published 42 The Supreme Court had however never held that prior restraint was unconstitutional On the contrary in Near v Minnesota 283 U S 697 1931 Chief Justice Charles E Hughes remarked that in wartime no one would question but that a government might prevent actual obstruction to its recruiting service or the publication of the sailing dates of transports or the number and location of troops 42 He further suggested that obscenity or incitement to insurrection would be similar grounds for prior restraint The court subsequently upheld free speech exceptions such as restrictions on demonstrations in Cox v New Hampshire 312 U S 569 1941 and censorship of motion pictures in Times Film Corp v City of Chicago 365 U S 43 1961 42 In New York Times Co v United States 403 U S 713 1971 better known as the Pentagon Papers case the government had sought to prevent the publication of classified material by The New York Times In this case the Supreme Court ruled 6 3 that the government had not reached the standard required by Near to justify prior restraint but the concurring justices gave differing opinions about where the line should be drawn In his opinion Justice Potter Stewart wrote that while publication of The Pentagon Papers would likely harm the national interest it would not result in direct immediate or irreparable harm to our Nation or its people 43 Failure to provide a clear line inevitably meant that the court had to deal with prior restraint on a case by case basis In Nebraska Press Association v Stuart 427 U S 539 1976 the court was called upon to decide whether news reportage of a lurid mass murder case in a small town in Nebraska would justify prior restraint in order to protect the defendant s right to a fair trial In this case the court ruled unanimously that it would not Most of the justices viewed Near as providing the only grounds for prior restraint and declined to expand its scope any further 44 Trial editMorland s research edit nbsp Howard Morland in 2008The Progressive was a left wing American monthly magazine of politics culture and opinion with a circulation of around 40 000 In 1978 its managing editor Sam Day Jr a former editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and its editor Erwin Knoll commissioned freelance journalist Howard Morland to write an article on the secrecy surrounding nuclear weapons production in America 45 In October 1978 Morland got Representative Ronald V Dellums to submit a series of questions about plutonium production to the Department of Energy DOE the successor to the AEC 46 The DOE responded by classifying the questions 47 In September and October 1978 the House Armed Services Committee held hearings on the proposed Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty There was widespread public ignorance of issues surrounding nuclear weapons and associated environmental concerns 48 Day and Morland hoped that by demystifying nuclear weapons they would promote more critical public debate and improve the prospects for nuclear disarmament 49 45 Morland claimed that I am precisely the type of person the First Amendment was intended to protect a political advocate whose ideas are unpopular with the general public and threatening to the government 49 Over a period of six months Morland systematically pieced together a design for a hydrogen bomb He visited a number of nuclear weapons facilities and interviewed government employees with the permission of the DOE usually identifying himself and his purpose He did not have a security clearance and had never had any access to classified nuclear weapons documents although it is possible that some classified information or ideas were accidentally or deliberately leaked to him 50 His scientific background was minimal he had taken five undergraduate courses in physics and chemistry as part of his Bachelor of Arts degree in economics at Emory University Morland identified the features of the Teller Ulam design as staging with a fission primary and a fusion secondary inside opposite ends of a hollow container and the use of radiation from the exploding primary to compress or implode the secondary 50 51 The notion that X rays could move solid objects with the force of thousands of tons of dynamite noted Morland was beyond the grasp of the science fiction writers of the time 35 Day sent draft copies of Morland s article out to reviewers in late 1978 and early 1979 including Ron Siegel a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Siegel gave his draft copy to George Rathjens a professor of political science there in February 1979 52 For many years Rathjens had issued a challenge to his graduate students to produce a workable design for a hydrogen bomb but no one had ever succeeded 53 Rathjens phoned The Progressive and urged that the article not be published When the editors dismissed his suggestion he sent the draft to the DOE 54 Apparently wrote Morland I had earned a passing grade on the Rathjens challenge 55 Legal arguments edit In March 1979 the editors sent a final draft to the DOE for comment DOE officials first in phone calls and then in person attempted to dissuade The Progressive from publishing the article on the grounds that it contained secret restricted data as defined by the Atomic Energy Act The Progressive s editors were not persuaded and told the officials that they intended to proceed with publishing Morland s article The DOE filed a motion to suppress the article with the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin in Madison on March 8 1979 54 There was only one judge in the Western District of Wisconsin at the time Judge James Edward Doyle but he recused himself as a friend of the magazine The case was therefore brought before Judge Robert W Warren a judge in the Eastern District of Wisconsin and heard by Warren in Milwaukee 56 57 nbsp The cover of the November 1979 issue of The Progressive which the United States Department of Energy attempted to censorLawyers for The Progressive voluntarily underwent security reviews and were granted Q clearances that allowed them to access restricted nuclear information Morland and The Progressive s editors declined to obtain clearances as they would have had to sign non disclosure agreements that would have prevented them from publishing the article This resulted in the lawyers being restricted in their communications with their clients 58 In seeking a temporary restraining order government lawyers argued that The Progressive was about to break the law causing irreparable harm The data in the article was born classified so it did not matter that it was an original work of the author They noted that prior restraint had been upheld by the courts before in matters of national security and argued that the Pentagon Papers decision did not apply as the Atomic Energy Act specifically allowed for injunctive relief Moreover the Pentagon Papers were historical whereas the hydrogen bomb was a current military weapon Finally they pointed out that the government had obligations under the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty not to assist non nuclear states in acquiring nuclear weapons 59 In granting the temporary restraining order on March 9 Warren said that he would have to think long and hard before I gave the hydrogen bomb to Idi Amin 60 James R Schlesinger the Secretary of Energy telephoned leading newspapers and warned them not to support The Progressive This was probably unnecessary for the media were supportive of the government s case Fred Graham the New York Times s legal correspondent predicted that the government would win the case 61 In an editorial on March 11 1979 The Washington Post wrote that The Progressive case as a press versus government First Amendment contest is John Mitchell s dream case the one the Nixon Administration was never lucky enough to get a real First Amendment loser 62 The newspaper called on The Progressive to forget about publishing it 63 In the Pentagon Papers case Professor Alexander Bickel an expert on the United States Constitution when asked hypothetically if prior restraint could ever be justified had told the court that he would draw the line at the hydrogen bomb 57 Daniel Ellsberg who had leaked the Pentagon Papers told Morland that he believed that nuclear weapon designs should be kept secret 64 Because of the horrific nature of thermonuclear weapons and the expectation that The Progressive would probably lose the case mainstream media organizations feared that the result would be an erosion of freedom of the press 65 However the court s role was to rule on whether publication was legal not whether it was wise 66 In keeping with the usual practice of keeping a temporary restraining order in effect for as short a time as possible Warren ordered that hearings be held on a preliminary injunction one week after the March 9 temporary restraining order On March 16 the Progressive s attorneys filed an affidavit from Theodore Postol an employee of the Department of Energy s Argonne National Laboratory stating that the information contained in the Morland article could be derived by any competent physicist from Teller s article on the hydrogen bomb in the Encyclopedia Americana 67 At the request of both parties the hearing was postponed to March 26 so they would have more time to file their briefs and affidavits 68 The parties were therefore back in court again on March 26 for a hearing on the government s request for a preliminary injunction Warren decided not to hold an evidentiary hearing at which the opposing teams of experts could be cross examined He also declined a suggestion by the Federation of American Scientists in its amicus curiae brief that a panel of experts be charged with examining the issue The case relied on written affidavits and briefs and the opposing counsels oral arguments 69 Testimony was introduced entirely in the form of sworn affidavits the most important of which were deemed classified and presented to the court in camera The government affiants included classification officers weapon lab scientists the Secretaries of Energy State and Defense and Nobel physics laureate Hans Bethe whom Judge Warren cited as the star witness for the plaintiff 70 The defense side had no experts with direct knowledge of nuclear weapon design until the unexpected appearance of Ray Kidder a nuclear weapon designer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory One of Kidder s jobs in 1962 had been to evaluate designs of the 29 thermonuclear devices tested in Operation Dominic 71 Kidder was able to credibly dispute government arguments in the battle of affidavits leveling the technical playing field Because of the importance of radiation implosion in civilian fusion research Kidder had been quietly waging a campaign to declassify it for some years prior to the Progressive case 72 The Progressive s legal team argued that the government had not established a case sufficient to overcome the First Amendment s presumption against prior restraint The article was based upon information in the public domain and was therefore neither a threat to national security nor covered by the Atomic Energy Act which in any case did not authorize prior restraint or was unconstitutional if it did In this counsel relied on the United States v Heine decision in which Judge Learned Hand ruled that information in the public domain could not be covered by the Espionage Act of 1917 73 The government s lawyers argued on the contrary that there was sensitive information in the article which was not in the public domain and which if published would harm arms control efforts 56 In attempting to apply the Near and Pentagon Papers standards the court was concerned about the prospect of publication causing the proliferation of nuclear weapons and potentially a global nuclear holocaust The government did not go so far as to claim that publication might pose an immediate or inevitable danger only that it would substantially increase the risk that thermonuclear weapons would become available or available at an earlier date to those who do not now have them If this should occur it would undermine our nonproliferation policy irreparably impair the national security of the United States and pose a threat to the peace and security of the world 74 However the court still found that a mistake in ruling against the United States could pave the way for thermonuclear annihilation for us all In that event our right to life is extinguished and the right to publish becomes moot 68 and that publication could indeed cause grave direct immediate and irreparable harm to the United States 68 thereby meeting the test the Supreme Court had enunciated in the Pentagon Papers case The preliminary injunction was therefore granted 68 Lawyers for The Progressive filed a motion to vacate the decision on the grounds that the information contained in Morland s article was already in the public domain The basis for this claim was two reports from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory UCRL 4725 Weapons Development During June 1956 and UCRL 5280 Weapons Development During June 1958 which contained detailed information on thermonuclear weapon design 75 One of them UCRL 4725 gave details about Bassoon a three stage thermonuclear device tested during Operation Redwing in 1956 76 It was found on the shelves of the Los Alamos library by Dmitri Rotow a researcher for the American Civil Liberties Union According to the government the reports had been inadvertently declassified On June 15 Warren therefore denied the motion on the grounds that such an error did not place the documents in the public domain 77 The appellants immediately appealed to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago claiming that the two documents had been on the shelves for a considerable period of time 78 The government now advanced the argument that technical data was not protected by the First Amendment 79 The motions for an expedited review were denied because the magazine s lawyers had waived that right something Morland and The Progressive editors discovered only from the court The preliminary injunction therefore remained in effect for six months 80 Case dropped edit On April 25 1979 a group of scientists who worked at the Argonne National Laboratory wrote to Senator John Glenn the Chairman of the United States Senate Subcommittee on Energy Nuclear Proliferation and Federal Services They were concerned about information being leaked in particular by the government s tacit acknowledgement that Morland s bomb design was substantially correct something that could not otherwise have been deduced from unclassified information 81 These included the affidavits by the United States Secretary of Defense Harold Brown and government expert witness Jack Rosengren 82 Copies of the letter were sent to major newspapers but with a cover note explaining that it was for background information and not publication After about four weeks the Glenn subcommittee forwarded it to the DOE which classified it 83 Unaware of this Hugh DeWitt a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons laboratory forwarded a copy to Chuck Hansen 83 Hansen was a computer programmer from Mountain View California who collected information about nuclear weapons as a hobby He had run a competition to design an H bomb the winner of which would be the first person to have their design classified by the DOE It now began to occur to him that his hobby might not be legal On August 27 he wrote a letter to Senator Charles H Percy detailing how much information he had deduced from publicly available sources This included his own design one not as good as Morland s which Hansen had not seen Hansen further charged that government scientists including Edward Teller Ted Taylor and George Rathjens had leaked sensitive information about thermonuclear weapons for which no action had been taken In this Hansen was mistaken Taylor had indeed been reprimanded and Teller was not the source of the information that Hansen attributed to him Hansen made copies of his letter available to several newspapers 84 When The Daily Californian the student run college newspaper of the University of California at Berkeley published excerpts from the Argonne letter on June 11 the DOE obtained a court order to prevent further publication Undeterred The Daily Californian published the Argonne letter in its entirety on June 13 85 In September the DOE declared the Hansen letter to be classified and obtained a temporary restraining order prohibiting The Daily Californian from publishing it 86 but the Hansen letter was published by the Madison Press Connection on September 16 84 The government then moved to dismiss their cases against both The Progressive and The Daily Californian as moot 80 Legacy editMorland s article was published in the November 1979 issue of The Progressive A month later he published an erratum in The Progressive with updates based on information that he had gathered during the trial from UCRL 4725 Chuck Hansen s letter and other sources In Morland s opinion the article contributed to a wave of anti nuclear activism in the late 1970s and early 1980s that resulted in amongst other things the closure of the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver 87 Chuck Hansen went on to publish a book U S Nuclear Weapons The Secret History in 1988 This was subsequently expanded to a self published five volume work entitled Swords of Armageddon 88 However many mainstream media organizations still remained reluctant to test the law by publishing 65 On September 30 1980 the Justice Department issued a statement that it would not prosecute alleged violations of the Atomic Energy Act during the Daily Californian or The Progressive cases 89 Hearings on the case were held by Glenn s subcommittee and by the House Subcommittee on Government Information and Individual Rights The subcommittees looked into the implications of the decision with regards to nuclear proliferation They also examined the doctrine of classified at birth but did not decide to amend the Atomic Energy Act to remove such provisions 90 Thus far fears of thermonuclear proliferation have not proven founded whether any country has successfully developed a hydrogen bomb since 1979 is disputed 91 From a legal standpoint the case proved to be a victory for no one 65 due to the indecisive nature of its conclusion 65 Yet it remains a celebrated case nonetheless In 2004 the 25th anniversary of the decision was commemorated with an academic conference at the Benjamin N Cardozo School of Law attended by many of the participants at which papers were presented 92 Law students still study the case which could have been a law school hypothetical designed to test the limits of the presumption of unconstitutionality attached to prior restraints 2 Notes edit United States v Progressive Inc 467 F Supp 990 W D Wis 1979 a b Linder 2012 Jones 1985 pp 253 255 Jones 1985 pp 553 557 Jones 1985 pp 558 559 Jones 1985 p 561 a b c Kaiser 2005 p 192 Hewlett amp Anderson 1962 p 647 Hewlett amp Anderson 1962 p 422 Jones 1985 pp 574 575 Hewlett amp Anderson 1962 p 429 a b Jones 1985 pp 576 578 Hewlett amp Anderson 1962 p 495 Hewlett amp Anderson 1962 p 501 Hewlett amp Anderson 1962 p 512 Hewlett amp Anderson 1962 p 510 a b Hewlett amp Anderson 1962 p 524 Fitzpatrick 1999 pp 83 88 Fitzpatrick 1999 pp 113 118 Fitzpatrick 1999 pp 120 121 Fitzpatrick 1999 pp 290 291 Fitzpatrick 1999 pp 259 260 Hewlett amp Duncan 1969 p 369 Hewlett amp Duncan 1969 pp 372 373 Hewlett amp Duncan 1969 pp 382 383 Hewlett amp Duncan 1969 pp 406 409 Fitzpatrick 1999 p 14 Hewlett amp Duncan 1969 p 439 Hewlett amp Duncan 1969 p 440 Rhodes 1995 pp 460 461 Rhodes 1995 pp 461 463 Hewlett amp Duncan 1969 pp 438 441 Fitzpatrick 1999 p 25 Morland 2005a pp 1405 1406 a b Morland 2005a p 1405 DeVolpi et al 1981 pp 135 136 Kaiser 2005 pp 198 202 Hewlett amp Holl 1989 p 40 Rhodes 1995 p 533 Hewlett amp Holl 1989 p 59 Entin 1980 p 538 a b c Entin 1980 p 539 Entin 1980 p 546 Entin 1980 pp 547 549 a b DeVolpi et al 1981 p 3 Morland 1981 pp 106 109 Morland 1979 pp 3 4 DeVolpi et al 1981 pp 44 48 a b Morland 2005b p 1366 a b Entin 1980 p 542 Morland 2005b pp 1366 1377 DeVolpi et al 1981 pp 4 6 Morland 2005b p 1370 a b DeVolpi et al 1981 pp 5 6 Morland 2005b p 1373 a b Tuerkheimer 2005 p 1362 a b Powe 1990 p 55 Williamson 2005 p 1360 DeVolpi et al 1981 pp 59 61 DeVolpi et al 1981 p 61 Knoll 1994 pp 711 712 Schlesinger 2005 p 1346 John Mitchell s Dream Case The Washington Post March 11 1979 p C6 Retrieved March 24 2012 Powe 1990 p 57 a b c d DeVolpi et al 1981 p 216 Entin 1980 p 569 Pincus Walter March 18 1979 Bomb Article Said Less Useful Than Encyclopedia The Washington Post Retrieved May 10 2018 a b c d Preliminary injunction ruling against The Progressive University of Missouri Kansas City Law School Archived from the original on December 3 2010 Retrieved January 12 2013 Entin 1980 p 543 Morland 1981 p 185 Kidder 2005 Bethe amp Kidder 2002 DeVolpi et al 1981 p 63 Entin 1980 p 551 De Geer 1991 p 354 Morland 2005a p 1375 United States v Progressive Inc 486 F Supp 5 W D Wis 1979 United States v Progressive Inc 610 F 2d 819 7th Cir 1979 DeVolpi et al 1981 pp 74 78 a b Entin 1980 pp 540 541 DeVolpi et al 1981 pp 7 8 256 257 DeVolpi et al 1981 pp 172 173 180 181 a b DeVolpi et al 1981 pp 7 181 182 a b DeVolpi et al 1981 pp 8 171 172 182 183 DeVolpi et al 1981 pp 14 113 178 179 278 280 pdf pages Morland 1981 pp 223 226 Morland 2005a pp 1375 1376 Morland Howard 1999 The Holocaust Bomb a Question of Time Federation of American Scientists Retrieved January 12 2013 DeVolpi et al 1981 p 9 DeVolpi et al 1981 pp 214 215 Easterbrook Gregg January 4 2004 Ideas amp Trends The Atomic Club If the Bomb Is So Easy to Make Why Don t More Nations Have It New York Times Retrieved March 2 2013 Rudenstine 2005 p 1337 References editBethe Hans Kidder Ray October 2002 The 1979 Bethe Kidder Correspondence Federation of American Scientists retrieved August 16 2016 De Geer Lars Erik 1991 The Radioactive Signature of the Hydrogen Bomb PDF Science amp Global Security 2 4 351 363 Bibcode 1991S amp GS 2 351D doi 10 1080 08929889108426372 ISSN 1547 7800 Retrieved August 24 2012 DeVolpi A Marsh Gerald E Postol T A Stanford G S 1981 Born Secret The H Bomb the Progressive Case and National Security PDF New York Pergamon Press ISBN 0 08 025995 2 OCLC 7197387 Entin Jonathan L 1980 United States v Progressive Inc The Faustian Bargain and the First Amendment Northwestern University Law Review 75 3 538 569 ISSN 0029 3571 Fitzpatrick Anne 1999 Igniting the Light Elements The Los Alamos Thermonuclear Weapon Project 1942 1952 PDF PhD Virginia Polytechnic Institute LA 13577 T Retrieved March 16 2012 Hewlett Richard G Anderson Oscar E 1962 The New World 1939 1946 A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission University Park Pennsylvania Pennsylvania State University Press ISBN 0 520 07186 7 Duncan Francis 1969 Atomic Shield Volume II 1947 1952 A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission University Park Pennsylvania Pennsylvania State University Press ISBN 0 520 07187 5 OCLC 3717478 Holl Jack M 1989 Atoms for Peace and War Volume III 1953 1961 Eisenhower and the Atomic Energy Commission A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission University Park Pennsylvania Pennsylvania State University Press ISBN 0 520 06018 0 OCLC 82275622 Jones Vincent 1985 Manhattan The Army and the Atomic Bomb Washington D C United States Army Center of Military History OCLC 10913875 Kaiser David 2005 The Atomic Secret in Red Hands American Suspicions of Theoretical Physicists during the Cold War In Carson Cathryn Hollinger David A eds Reappraising Oppenheimer Centennial Studies and Reflections Berkeley California Office for History of Science and Technology University of California pp 185 216 ISBN 0 9672617 3 2 OCLC 64385611 Kidder Ray March 2005 Weapons of Mass Destruction National Security and a Free Press Cardozo Law Review 26 4 1389 1399 Knoll Erwin 1994 The H Bomb and the First Amendment William amp Mary Bill of Rights Journal 3 2 705 714 ISSN 1065 8254 Linder Doug 2012 Prior Restraints and the Presumption of Unconstitutionality University of Missouri Kansas City Law School Retrieved March 6 2013 Morland Howard November 1979 The H Bomb Secret To Know is to Ask Why The Progressive 3 12 ISSN 0033 0736 Retrieved March 4 2012 1981 The Secret that Exploded New York Random House ISBN 978 0394512976 2005a The Article Cardozo Law Review 26 4 1366 1378 ISSN 0270 5192 Retrieved March 4 2012 2005b Born Secret PDF Cardozo Law Review 26 4 1401 1408 ISSN 0270 5192 Retrieved March 4 2012 Powe Lucas A 1990 The H Bomb Injunction University of Colorado Law Review 61 55 79 ISSN 0041 9516 Rhodes Richard 1995 Dark Sun The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb New York Simon and Schuster ISBN 0 684 80400 X OCLC 32509950 Rudenstine David March 2005 Welcome Cardozo Law Review 26 4 1337 1342 ISSN 0270 5192 Retrieved March 4 2012 Schlesinger James R March 2005 Transcript of Weapons of Mass Destruction National Security and a Free Press Seminal Issues as Viewed Through the Lens of the Progressive Case Context Cardozo Law Review 26 4 1342 1352 ISSN 0270 5192 Tuerkheimer Frank March 2005 Transcript of Weapons of Mass Destruction National Security and a Free Press Seminal Issues as Viewed Through the Lens of the Progressive Case The Case Cardozo Law Review 26 4 1362 1366 ISSN 0270 5192 Williamson Brady March 2005 Transcript of Weapons of Mass Destruction National Security and a Free Press Seminal Issues as Viewed Through the Lens of the Progressive Case The Case Cardozo Law Review 26 4 1358 1361 ISSN 0270 5192 External links editTelford Thomas L Herbeck Dale A United States v Progressive Inc Text of the decision Freedom of Speech in the United States Boston Boston College Archived from the original on January 15 2013 Retrieved March 4 2012 The H Bomb Secret How we got it why we re telling it The Progressive November 1979 entire issue online Retrieved March 4 2012 Picture of Morland and his model H bomb Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Archived from the original on May 10 2013 Retrieved January 12 2013 Preliminary injunction ruling against The Progressive University of Missouri Kansas City Law School Archived from the original on December 3 2010 Retrieved January 12 2013 Morland Howard The Holocaust Bomb A Question of Time Federation of American Scientists Retrieved January 12 2013 Portals nbsp Journalism nbsp Law nbsp Nuclear technology nbsp United States Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title United States v Progressive Inc amp oldid 1178917672, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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