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By the time he issued his preliminary injunction on March 26, even Judge Warren had apparently come to understand that the Morland article would not “give a hydrogen bomb to Idi Amin.” In his opinion he wrote: “Does the article provide a ‘do-ityourself ’ guide to the hydrogen bomb? Probably not. A number of aªdavits make it quite clear that a sine qua non to thermonuclear capability is a large, sophisticated industrial capability coupled with a coterie of imaginative, resourceful scientists and technicians. One does not build a hydrogen bomb in the basement.” When we walked out of Judge Warren’s courtroom on the afternoon of March 9, we were “under restraint.” We had decided that we would comply strictly with the court’s order while we pursued our Wght for our First Amendment rights, but it was only gradually that we began to understand the full implications of being muzzled. We are, and have been since that day, the only journalists in America who are compelled to keep “secrets” under penalty of the law, “secrets” available to anyone who goes looking for them. It is an unenviable state, and one we hope no other American journalist will ever have to share. The H-Bomb Secret To Know How Is to Ask Why Howard Morland november 1979 What you are about to learn is a secret—a secret that the United States and four other nations, the makers of hydrogen weapons, have gone to extraordinary lengths to protect. The secret is in the coupling mechanism that enables an ordinary Wssion bomb— the kind that destroyed Hiroshima—to trigger the far deadlier energy of hydrogen fusion. The physical pressure and heat generated by x and gamma radiation, moving outward from the trigger at the speed of light, bounces against the weapon’s inner wall and is reXected with enormous force into the sides of a carrot-shaped “pencil” which contains the fusion fuel. That, within the limits of a single sentence, is the essence of a concept that initially eluded the physicists of the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China; that they discovered independently and kept tenaciously to themselves, and that may not yet have occurred to the weapon makers of a dozen other nations bent on building the hydrogen bomb. I discovered it simply by reading and asking questions, without the beneWt of security clearance or access to classiWed materials. 272 part 13 opposing nuclear weapons Why am I telling you? It’s not because I want to help you build an H-bomb. Have no fear; that would be far beyond your capability unless you have the resources of at least a medium-sized government. I am telling the secret to make a basic point as forcefully as I can: Secrecy itself, especially the power of a few designated “experts” to declare some topics o¤ limits, contributes to a political climate in which the nuclear establishment can conduct business as usual, protecting and perpetuating the production of these horror weapons. Of all the world’s nuclear weapons secrets, none has eluded publication more successfully than the secret of the H-bomb. In the twenty-Wve years since its Wrst successful Weld test in the South PaciWc, no description of how it works has ever been made public. The energy of an exploding Wssion bomb is transferred by means of radiation pressure to the hydrogen part of the weapon. Radiation pressure—a term never mentioned in the open literature—is the essence of what remains of the H-bomb secret. The weapons are harder to believe than to understand. There are three stages to the detonation of a hydrogen weapon: Wssion, fusion, and more Wssion. Although one event must follow the other for the weapon to work, they happen so rapidly that a human observer would experience only a single event—an explosion of unearthly magnitude. Within the bomb, however, Wssion—the splitting of uranium and plutonium nuclei—comes Wrst. The mechanism for the Wrst Wssion stage is a miniaturized version of the Nagasaki bomb. It has roughly the same explosive power as the World War II weapon, but it measures less than twelve inches in diameter. This Wssion “trigger” vaguely resembles a soccer ball, with the same pattern of twenty hexagons and twelve pentagons forming a sphere. Detonator wires are attached to each pentagonal or hexagonal face. When its full explosive energy is realized, this oversized cantaloupe becomes the source of the radiation pressure which...

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