Brent Nicastro
Progressive staffers including Erwin Knoll (champagne bottle) and Sam Day (white shirt) celebrate the government's dismissal of the case.
In 1979, a federal judge in Milwaukee blocked The Progressive from publishing an article regarding H-bomb design. The case has inspired two books, a play, and dozens of articles. Yet what this extraordinary event really merits is a major motion picture. Here’s how I envision the opening scene:
There’s a sharp clicking of shoes as a messenger walks down hallways and through guarded doors before handing an envelope marked “Top Secret” to an important-looking man, who nods, then continues the envelope’s journey into the Oval Office. President Jimmy Carter cracks open the seal, and reads a one-page memo from U.S. Attorney General Griffin Bell, notifying him of the government’s determination to block publication.
Rows of perfectly square white teeth disappear into a frown as Carter scrawls his response on the memo’s top: “Good move, proceed. J”
Instantly, the scene shifts to a small, messy office in Madison, Wisconsin, where an ill-dressed middle-aged man is rifling frantically through mountains of clutter on his desk. Erwin Knoll, editor of The Progressive, at last locates a crumpled manuscript entitled “The H-Bomb Secret: How We Got It, Why We’re Telling It.” He grabs his coat and dashes out the door, accompanied by Sam Day, the magazine’s managing editor, as they head to meet a delegation of high-ranking officials from the U.S. Departments of Energy and Justice. “I love it!” exclaims Knoll on the way.
These are the events that played out on March 2, 1979, as the full might and authority of the U.S. government was about to come crashing down on a tiny political magazine in the Midwest.
The meeting between The Progressive’s editors and attorneys and the government delegation ended without resolution. The officials said the article, written by an ambitious freelancer named Howard Morland, contained “restricted data” that, if published, would threaten national security. Knoll responded that 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.”
In short order, The Progressive formally rejected the government’s offer to rewrite Morland’s article, removing the “restricted data.” On March 9, 1979, Federal Judge Robert W. Warren of Milwaukee granted a temporary restraining order blocking publication. It was the first time in U.S. history that the government had censored a publication on national security grounds.
For the next six months and nineteen days, The Progressive and its editors were prohibited, under the 1954 Atomic Energy Act, from “publishing or otherwise communicating, transmitting or disclosing” the restricted information in the H-bomb article. It was a historic confrontation between the rights of the press and the power of the state, and, in the end, The Progressive prevailed—but only to a point.
In early 1978, Sam Day left his job as editor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and came to The Progressive with a mandate to make nuclear issues a main focus of the magazine. In April, he traveled to Indiana for a formal debate against Charles Gilbert of the Department of Energy (DOE), which runs the nation’s nuclear weapons program. Afterward, over a beer, Day expressed his desire to tour the nation’s nuclear factories, and Gilbert, to his surprise, agreed.
While preparing for his travels, Day learned about a New Hampshire activist named Howard Morland who had put together an interesting slide show on nuclear weapons. The two met and decided that Morland would accept the DOE’s offer to tour the plants, in pursuit of the Teller-Ulam Idea, a closely guarded “secret” of H-bomb design. Morland, a former Air Force pilot, found it egregious that such a secret still existed, providing a pretext for shutting off public access to information about nuclear weapons.
Knoll, formerly 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. Five nations had by this time independently mastered this achievement, with no help from the Rosenbergs. The Big Lie that nuclear proliferation hinged on access to some sort of secret was, Knoll believed, responsible for nearly all of the political repression—the spy scares, the witch hunts, the loyalty purges—that had confounded progressive change in Cold War America. Knoll leapt at this chance to boldly challenge the nuclear-secrecy mystique.
Morland spent the remainder of 1978 touring plants, researching publicly available literature, and meeting with scientists knowledgeable about nuclear weapons. He found that the more he knew, the easier it was to obtain information. (At one plant, Morland asked the scientists whether a particular piece of equipment “is used to press lithium-6 deuteride powder into a shaped, ceramic-like material for later machining.” After a long, shocked pause, one of the scientists answered yes.) He respected the expertise of weapon makers; they, in turn, responded to his sincere desire to know.
In January 1979, Morland wrote the first draft of an article on the H-bomb secret, complete with diagrams showing key principles of H-bomb design. The article, as rewritten by Day, spilled the secret of the Teller-Ulam Idea in its very first paragraph: “The secret is in the coupling mechanism that enables an ordinary fission 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 reflected with enormous force into the sides of the carrot-shaped ‘pencil’ which contains the fusion fuel.”
A copy of the manuscript was sent to an MIT scientist for review. He passed it on to the DOE, which pushed the panic button. After a series of emergency meetings, Bell sent his memo to Carter, and the government sent its delegation to Madison.
There was, until 1979, only one occasion in U.S. history when the federal government sought to block publication. It happened on the other end of this decade, in 1971, when the Nixon Administration moved to suppress the Pentagon Papers. But the U.S. Supreme Court rejected this censorship attempt.
In the United States of America v. Progressive, Inc., Erwin Knoll, Samuel Day, Jr., and Howard Morland, the Carter Administration tried again. This time it succeeded, thanks to Judge Warren—a conservative Republican nominated by Richard M. Nixon in August 1974, one day before he resigned in disgrace.
The March 9 hearing lasted ninety minutes. The government claimed that publication of Morland’s article would result in “grave, direct, immediate, and irreparable harm” to the national security of the United States—adjectives selected to meet the precise criteria for prior restraint set by the Supreme Court in the Pentagon Papers case. Warren sided with Uncle Sam, proclaiming: “I’d like . . . to think a long, hard time before I gave the hydrogen bomb to Idi Amin.” He also falsely called the article “the recipe for a do-it-yourself hydrogen bomb.”
Meanwhile, government officials led by Defense Secretary Harold Brown contacted The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times to discourage them from rallying to The Progressive’s defense. The New York Times withheld judgment, while the other two papers came out strongly against The Progressive. The Washington Post, Knoll’s alma mater, was especially hostile: “As a press-versus-government First Amendment contest, this, as far as we can tell, is [Nixon Attorney General] John Mitchell’s dream case—the one the Nixon Administration was never lucky enough to get: a real First Amendment loser.”
Perhaps the harshest blow was delivered by legendary journalist I.F. Stone, Knoll’s mentor and longtime friend. Knoll and Ron Carbon, then The Progressive’s publisher, had lunch with Stone and others in Washington, D.C., where they were making contacts regarding the H-bomb case. Stone, to Knoll’s horror, denigrated the magazine’s desire to print Morland’s article. “He thought it was stupid,” recalls Morton Mintz, a Washington Post reporter who was present. “He was quite affirmative and astringent about it.”
Critical letters flowed into The Progressive. “I hope the government wins its case, as the First Amendment was never meant to cover irresponsibility of this kind,” wrote one reader. Another called Morland’s article “a craven effort to gain publicity and subscribers. If I had a subscription, I’d cancel it.” (Knoll wrote back, “It’s always a good idea to subscribe, so you won’t be caught in that predicament.”)
Knoll took the lead in defending the magazine’s image. “The government’s assertions are demonstrably absurd,” he wrote in a column for The Washington Post. “The contention that an enterprise with The Progressive’s pathetically limited resources can penetrate the ‘secrecy’ of the nuclear establishment is, on its face, preposterous.”
From the start, the case against The Progressive took on Kafkaesque tones. The government blocked the magazine from showing Morland’s article to any scientist who lacked security clearance. Court filings were purged of references to articles that had appeared in magazines and encyclopedias. Knoll and other defendants were not allowed to see many of the affidavits submitted on their behalf. They were subject to court decisions they could not read, based on proceedings they were not allowed to attend.
Despite these constraints, unprecedented in the history of American jurisprudence, the magazine managed to turn the tide, winning support from scientists—who knew that the so-called secrets in Morland’s article were obvious from publicly available literature—and the media, which grew wary of the government’s increasingly bold exertions in the name of national security.
On Sunday, March 25, The New York Times’ lead editorial came down squarely on The Progressive’s side, calling the government’s charges “lame in both logic and law. The shouts of alarm are more dangerous than the danger they describe. The government is doing its best to intimidate the Milwaukee judge and to incite the public against the magazine.”
Meanwhile, independent researchers were proving the fallacy of the government’s position. Milwaukee Sentinel reporter Joe Manning spent a week researching nuclear weapons, using only materials available in public libraries. Manning concluded that Teller and Ulam “may have come up with some sort of arrangement that would compress the fuel through the use of soft x-rays from the atomic bomb blast reflected off the bomb casing wall.” Bingo.
Then, on May 8, a twenty-three-year-old Harvard student named Dimitri Rotow found, on the shelves of the Los Alamos Scientific Library, a report declassified four years earlier that disclosed vitally sensitive information about hydrogen bombs. The DOE immediately closed the library to launch a document-by-document search of the shelves. Senator John Glenn, the chair of a subcommittee overseeing national security, demanded a high-level probe.
The government’s own attorneys—including Frank Tuerkheimer, then the U.S. attorney for Western Wisconsin—at this point urged that the prosecution be dropped. (Tuerkheimer told me he was “really shocked” when he got his first look at Morland’s article: “I saw things in the boxes marked off as ‘censored’ that I had known in high school, when I was interested in nuclear physics.”) But Bell refused, declaring, “There is sometimes honor in taking a weak position.”
In late May, Senator Glenn sent the DOE a copy of a letter he had received a month earlier from four scientists complaining about the government’s own inconsistency and negligence in letting “restricted data” into the public domain. The DOE responded by classifying the letter, which by this time had been sent to a half-dozen newspapers. Despite threats of criminal prosecution, the letter was published in The Daily Californian, a Berkeley student paper.
More disobedience followed. Chuck Hansen, a California-based nuclear-weapons buff, objected to the government’s “purely political” case against The Progressive in an August 27 letter to Senator Charles Percy of Illinois. The letter speculated as to the nature of the Teller-Ulam Idea and the concepts underlying H-bomb design.
The DOE classified Hansen’s letter. Government agents showed up at Percy’s office and Hansen’s home, demanding the surrender of all copies. Other known recipients—including The Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, and The Daily Californian—received warnings that the letter contained “restricted data.” On Saturday, September 15, the government went into a federal district court and obtained a judicial restraint against The Daily Californian on national security grounds.
News of this latest spasm of censorship rocked the Madison Press Connection, a paper produced by striking employees of Madison’s two daily newspapers. That morning’s edition reported that the paper had obtained a copy of Hansen’s letter. All day long, the staff half-expected the office door to be kicked in by federal marshals in search of the forbidden document. When the government censored The Daily Californian, a decision was made to publish the letter in a special Sunday edition of the Press Connection, along with an editorial explaining why. The staff worked into the night to get the issue on the streets, thwarting any attempt to prevent publication on the paper’s usual schedule.
On Monday, September 17, the Justice Department held a press conference to declare that it was dropping its case against The Progressive because “the publication of an article containing restricted data . . . by a newspaper in Madison” had rendered the issue moot. The Press Connection was deluged with media attention, much of it negative and sensational. “It was a zoo,” former editor Ron McCrea told me. “The national television networks came in. We were inundated. It was an incredible media onslaught. We received many really hateful calls and death threats.”
The Progressive claimed victory. “We are obviously delighted that this attempt to deprive Americans of information to which they are fully entitled has been beaten back,” said Knoll, before popping open a bottle of champagne for photographs that appeared around the world. “We hope the government will think a long, hard time before it mounts this kind of censorship again.”
But privately, Knoll and the other defendants were bitterly disappointed. Just four days before, on September 13, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago heard oral arguments on The Progressive case. The panel of three appellate court judges took a decidedly skeptical view of the government’s claims. It looked likely that they would come down strongly against Warren’s decision, vindicating The Progressive and giving future courts yet another clear precedent for rejecting prior restraint.
But the government’s decision to drop the case confounded all that, leaving key issues unresolved. Even Judge Warren, whom I interviewed in April 1995 (he died three years later), felt the government acted to “cut their losses.” In fact, he said, “I was a little disgusted with the government. If they started this thing, they should have had faith in their cause. And apparently, they didn’t.”
In early October 1979, The Progressive published Morland’s article, without any changes. Morland, who now lives in Arlington, Virginia, credits The Progressive case with helping change “the cultural attitude” toward secrecy claims. In modern times, he says, “the cult of military secrecy is a thing to be ridiculed. And I’d like to think part of that has to do with what we were doing in the 1970s and 1980s to create a new national consensus.”
Most experts agree that the evidence presented to Judge Warren did not justify the imposition of prior restraint and that the Supreme Court, had things gone that far, would have ruled to this effect. But that didn’t happen, and instead the case stands as an example of how the government, aided by a federal judge, successfully used the Atomic Energy Act to block publication, albeit temporarily. “Judge Warren saw the state’s asserted interest as preeminent and simply refused to enforce the plain language of the First Amendment and First Amendment case law,” groaned one legal scholar.
Brady Williamson, one of The Progressive’s attorneys, looks on the bright side: “Nobody went to jail, and the article got published. This case will be remembered as the time a federal judge appointed by Richard Nixon accepted at face value a series of government affidavits that on their face were incredible, and were proved so.”
During our interview, Judge Warren admitted that the government misrepresented the threat posed by Morland’s piece, but he nonetheless defended his decision to block publication, in terms that reveal more than he intended.
“I was raised in a time when country was important,” Warren told me. “And the protection of country and its security had a very high priority among our panoply of values. Now, these days, if the United States and its government decide they have to engage in some action around the world, I’m appalled by the way everybody feels free to question it, beyond what I think is reasonable . . . . I think I’m of a generation that felt that, if it was necessary to protect the integrity of the United States, you didn’t challenge it. On the other hand, nowadays it seems that you grab a placard and away you go. Or sit down and pour blood on books or something.”
Warren also claimed censorship was appropriate “because a country like China, or a country like Russia, could save literally years” of research using the disclosures in the piece. When I pointed out to Warren that, by 1979, both these countries had had H-bombs for decades, he made an even more astounding display of his ignorance: “I don’t remember. Atomic bombs maybe, but this is thermonuclear, and of course there’s a vast difference.”
Erwin Knoll spoke and wrote often about the H-bomb story. One of the last things he wrote—it came out shortly after his death in November 1994—was for the William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal. Knoll expressed his “sincere regret” over one thing: his decision to obey Warren’s injunction. “If such circumstances were to arise again,” he promised, “I would publish and be damned.”