These drills, with their images of eerily empty streets and the activity of hiding from a nuclear bomb under a schoolroom desk, would later become symbols of the seemingly inescapable and common fate created by such weapons.
These generally included drills for evacuation to fallout shelters, popularized through popular media such as the US film, Duck and Cover. The concepts in Morland's book are widely acknowledged in other popular-audience descriptions of the inner workings of thermonuclear weapons.ĭuring the 1950s, many countries developed large civil-defense programs designed to aid the populace in the event of nuclear warfare. Morland and The Progressive won the case, and Morland published a book on his journalistic research for the article, the trial, and a technical appendix in which he "corrected" what he felt were false assumptions in his original article about the design of thermonuclear weapons in his book, The Secret That Exploded. Ray Kidder, a nuclear weapon designer testifying for Morland, identified several open literature sources for the information Morland repeated in his article, while aviation historian Chuck Hansen produced a similar document for US Senator Charles Percy. In 1979 the US Department of Energy sued to suppress the publication of an article by Howard Morland in The Progressive magazine detailing design information on thermonuclear and fission nuclear weapons he was able to glean in conversations with officials at several DoE contractor plants active in manufacture of nuclear weapons components. However, two controversial publications breached this silence in ways that made many in the US and allied nuclear weapons community very anxious.įormer nuclear weapons designer Theodore Taylor described how terrorists could, without using any classified information at all, design a working fission nuclear weapon to journalist John McPhee, who published this information in the best-selling book The Curve of Binding Energy in 1974. It is generally possible to trace US knowledge of foreign progress in nuclear weapons technology by reading the US Department of Energy document "Restricted Data Declassification Decisions-1946 to the Present" (although some nuclear weapons design data have been reclassified since concern about proliferation of nuclear weapons to " nth countries" increased in the late 1970s). In general, however, the design of nuclear weapons has been the most closely guarded secret until long after the secrets had been independently developed-or stolen-by all the major powers and a number of lesser ones. Diagrams of the general principles of operation of thermonuclear weapons have been available in very general terms since at least 1969 in at least two encyclopedia articles, and open literature research into inertial confinement fusion has been at least richly suggestive of how the "secondary" and "inter" stages of thermonuclear weapons work. Pictures of nuclear weapons themselves (the actual casings) were not made public until 1960, and even those were only mock-ups of the " Fat Man" and " Little Boy" weapons dropped on Japan-not the more powerful weapons developed more recently. After the United States began a regular program of nuclear testing in the late 1940s, continuing through the 1950s (and matched by the Soviet Union), the mushroom cloud has served as a symbol of the weapons themselves. The first pictures released of a nuclear explosion-the blast from the Trinity test-focused on the fireball itself later pictures would focus primarily on the mushroom cloud that followed. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in the "atomic age", and the bleak pictures of the bombed-out cities released shortly after the end of World War II became symbols of the power and destruction of the new weapons (it is worth noting that the first pictures released were only from distances, and did not contain any human bodies-such pictures would only be released in later years). The now-familiar peace symbol was originally a specifically anti-nuclear weapons icon.