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The latest security problem at Los Alamos National Laboratory seems rather confusing.
At issue are two removable computer hard drives. They're supposed to be kept in a vault when they're not in use, and they turned up missing in an audit after the Cerro Grande wildfire.
An investigation commenced, and then last week, the two drives were found behind a copying machine inside the secure area.
Just why there's a copying machine in a high-security zone that contains all manner of secret information is beyond me, but then again, there are a lot of things that are hard to understand when it comes to American secrecy.
According to the Department of Energy, the disks contained instructions about how to disarm or disable nuclear weapons.
Now, I can understand why our government would want to prevent the dissemination of information about how to build nuclear devices.
Back in 1979, the federal government went to court in an
effort to stop a magazine -- The Progressive,
based
in Madison, Wisc. -- from publishing an article by Howard
Morland.
Morland, a free-lance writer who had no background in physics beyond a couple of college courses, had set out to learn whether you could learn to build a hydrogen bomb at home in your spare time without accessing any classified information.
That is, was there enough information in the public domain then -- everything from scientific journals to common encyclopedias to what you might learn on a public tour of a nuclear facility -- for a person of reasonable intelligence to design a functioning hydrogen bomb?
He concluded that it was possible, and the suit by the federal government confirmed the conclusion.
This was only the second time in history that the
federal government had attempted to subvert the First
Amendment by gaining prior restraint
on the grounds
of national security -- the first was the Pentagon Papers
case in 1971.
The feds got a six-month restraining order against the Progressive, then dropped the case because other publications had by then presented similar information.
One disturbing aspect of the Progressive case was that
the federal government was attempting to create a
thought crime.
In the view of the federal attorneys, the crime was not in getting the information, which was available to any diligent person. It was in analyzing, organizing and synthesizing the information -- Morton's thought processes. Having a government that tells people that they can't think in certain ways probably isn't what Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had in mind in 1776, but hardly anybody cares about that any more, anyway.
In the 21 years since then, nobody seems to have used the Progressive article to build a hydrogen bomb, and for all I know, there may now be a detailed how-to article on the Internet.
But even if the instructions are available, you still need a lot of expensive stuff that you can't buy at the hardware store. Only national governments have that capacity, and those that want to have already figured out how to build nuclear bombs.
So it really doesn't seem to affect our security much, one way or the other, if information about how to build a nuclear weapon is available to any interested person.
Now, consider the current Los Alamos problem, which has inspired congressional hearings and demands for Energy Secretary Bill Richard's resignation.
The instructions for disarming and disabling thermonuclear weapons may be available. For one thing, wouldn't we live in a safer world if such information were widely available?
For another, just when would these instructions be applied? Is it likely that Saddam Hussein will find an unexploded nuclear bomb in his back yard some morning, and then summon a team that uses that classified hard-disk information to disarm it? Wouldn't the Air Force have arranged to have the bomb detonate first? And if it was a dud, then wouldn't the Iraqis try to disarm it even if they didn't have an instruction manual?
As I said, I have a lot of trouble understanding American secrecy policies. Figuring out neutron cross-sections and polonium initiators would probably be a snap by comparison.
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