Riemann's Contribution to Flight and Laser Fusion

Exploding the H-Bombby Charles B. StevensThe Secret That Exploded,* the recently published autobiographicalaccount by Howard Morland of the 1979Progressive magazine court case, detonates a number ofbombshells about the celebrated case in which the governmentattempted to block publication of Morland'sarticle "The H-Bomb Secret." But the book leaves unexplodeda number of even bigger bombshells about theclassification of vital scientific information—in particular,that pertaining to the development of fusion energy.As Morland's book recounts, in spring through fall 1979,the U.S. Justice Department waged a six-month civil lawsuit to bar The Progressive, a Wisconsin-based antinuclearmagazine, from publishing Morland's article, arguing thatthe article contained sensitive information on the workingsof the hydrogen bomb.The Fusion Energy Foundation entered an amicus curiaebrief, showing that the so-called secrets that the governmentwanted to keep classified had been out in the openscientific literature for more than a century and that whatwas really at issue was a deliberate policy of classifyingresearch vital for broad-based scientific progress. The FEFhad already published a series of articles that made publicfor the first time the scientific origins of the H-bomb inthe 1859 paper on shock waves by the German mathematicalphysicist Bernard Riemann and the developmentof those ideas by leading German hydrodynamicists andaerodynamicists of the Gottingen school during the 20thcentury.After the U.S. government abruptly dropped its caseagainst the The Progressive in Sept. 1979, the magazine'smanaging editor, Samuel Day, jr., reported that both theFEF's friend-of-the-court brief and the government's unwillingnessto take on the FEF's arguments directly hadbeen pivotal in the government's decision.Now, Morland's book fills in many details of this story.First, The Secret That Exploded confirms that it was thewide circulation of articles on the H-bomb in Fusionmagazine and in New Solidarity, an independent semiweeklynewspaper that had published the story by FEFauthors, that led the government to abruptly pull out ofthe case.Second, Morland certifies that Fusion and New Solidaritywere the first to publish the essential details of the H-bomb design developed by Edward Teller, Stan Ulam, andtheir collaborators in the late 1940s and early 1950s.Third, evidence contained in Morland's book demonstratesconclusively that the entire Progressive case epi-sode was in fact targeted against Fusion and New Solidarity'srevelations about (1) the connection betweenRiemann's theoretical work and the development of thehydrogen bomb, and (2) the contemporary work of Sovietscientist Dr. Leonid Rudakov on inertial confinementfusion, drawing on the same German hydrodynamicisttradition.The most explosive point raised by the Progressive case,though this is not recognized by Morland, was, in fact,that the FEF analysts had been able to arrive at theirunderstanding of the secret H-bomb design through theirappreciation of Riemann's method, specifically, his workon shock waves.Morland's book, furthermore, contains sufficient evidence,when combined with other crucial evidence thatwill be presented here, to demonstrate that the "Progressiveassignment" was run under the direct managementof leaders of what might be called the antiscience "Wellsian"tradition—technocrats like Fabian Society memberH.G. Wells himself, who are dedicated to containing thespread of advanced technology, and cite the threat ofnuclear proliferation and other bogus considerations tojustify their suppression of technological advances. The* Howard Moreland, The Secret That Exploded (New York:Random House, May 1981).42 FUSION October-November 1981