Riemann's Contribution to Flight and Laser Fusion

fense Information, a private think tank that is one of thekingpins in the international disarmament movement,gave Morland his assignment; it was Johnson who putMorland in touch with Sam Day, the managing editor ofThe Progressive, and arranged for Morland to write theH-bomb secrets article. (As for Johnson's think tank, DerStern magazine reported in early 1981 that the Center forDefense Information had provided the West German"greenies" with the maps of German nuclear weaponsinstallations that the environmentalist groups have usedto plan occupations of those sites.)Sam Day was very quickly able to fulfill Morland's openambition to become an "amateur atom spy." Despite theradical antinuclear associations of Day, Morland, and TheProgressive, Day was able to arrange a complete nationwideVIP tour of the U.S. nuclear weapons productionsfacilities for Morland.After his tour, Morland wrote his H-bomb secrets article.As Morland reports and documents, the article was technicallywrong. Despite this, however, the government,after getting hold of a prepublication draft from Day, wentto court to suppress the article's publication. This actionwas directed by then secretary of energy James R. Schlesinger.The course of the case, as Morland relates it, is a bitconfusing—and this is clearly because Morland didn't fullyknow what he was in the middle of. The chief point thatMorland makes is that the government based its case forsuppression on the fact that his article was technicallyflawed:The government's affidavits. . . contended that Icould not possibly have derived the conclusions inmy article from the sources I had enumerated, andthat I therefore must have had access to secret documents.... In their secret affidavit. . . the interestingassertion [was made] that there were errors in mydescription that did not follow logically from anythingI cited, and which I must therefore have purposelyintroduced to conceal my sources.As Morland's book tells in detail, in the course of thecourt proceedings, the government itself corrected TheProgressive article's flaws! Even stranger, the correct designfor the H-bomb was submitted to the open courtrecord during the proceedings, but it was never commentedupon by the government. The correct design isthat which had appeared in Fusion, New Solidarity, and inthe FEF's amicus curiae brief.Morland states in his book that he was mailed thecorrect diagram in an envelope with the return address ofthe Naval Research Laboratory on it. An accompanyingunsigned letter pointed out that the enclosed diagramfrom the New Solidarity article "would have been stampedSECRET (CNWDI)" had it been submitted to the Departmentof Energy for classification.At this point it should be noted that Dave Johnson, whooriginally set up Morland to write the article, is the formerbrother-in-law of this writer. I know that he was informedabout the 1976 New Solidarity article, and that he was alsovery well informed about the article's pertinence to thedesign of H-bombs.In a telephone interview with me this spring, HowardMorland was quite surprised to learn this, since, accordingto him, "Dave never told me about that." Johnson, whoset Morland up to do a story exposing the H-bomb secret,had never mentioned any of this information to Morland!The pieces of the Progressive case fall into place onceJohnson and Day's connections are established. Johnsonworks closely with Morton Halperin, and Day is closelyassociated with McGeorge Bundy. As noted above, Halperinand Bundy are both figures who are at the helm ofcommand of the zero-growth, antinuclear, and nonproliferationgroups.As Morland relates in his book, Halperin directly involvedhimself in the court case. And the book alsoprovides circumstantial evidence of McGeorge Bundy'sinput into Day's activities.BacktrackingAs Fusion had maintained from the beginning of theProgressive case, the case was at least indirectly targetedagainst the Fusion Energy Foundation and its efforts toend the classification of scientific research that is criticalto the inertial confinement fusion program. Now, throughthe publication of Morland's book, it appears that thisoperation was successfully stymied by the timely action ofthe FEF in publicly responding to the attempted setup.Even Progressive managing editor Day had to note the keyrole of the FEF's amicus curiae brief in determining theoutcome of the legal proceedings. And author Morlandhas now begun to suspect that he was used from the startas an unwitting patsy to get the case into court. Apparently,the optimal scenario was to have the article publishedand then have the government win the case andproceed with the prosecution of the FEF.This plan was upset when in the March-April 1979 issueof Fusion, Uwe Parpart detailed the connection betweenRiemann—and his published writings—and the developmentof inertial confinement fusion. The plan was furtherupset when Dr. Friedwardt Winterberg, professor of physicsat the Desert Research Institute at the University ofNevada and a pioneer in inertial confinement fusionoutside the government-controlled programs, collaboratedwith the FEF in getting out the story of the scientificroots of the H-bomb. 2Therefore, the Progressive operation was turned into asmokescreen: The H-bomb secrets story with its antinuclearangle was used to cover up the real secret of theimportance of Riemann's method for scientific progresstoday.Notes46 FUSION October-November 19811. "On the Propagation of Plane Air Waves of Finite Amplitude." Thearticle was translated Into English for the first time by Uwe Parpart andDr. Steven Bardwell of the FEF, and appeared In the InternationalJournal of Fusion Energy, 2:1 (1980).2. See for example Wlnterberg's "Some Reminiscences About the Originsof Inertial Confinement," Fusion, Nov. 1979, p. 41.