I’ll even take help from nucular weapons experts. I’m writing a law review article that discusses, among other things, the 1979 Progressive case, in which the government temporarily prohibited a magazine from publishing an article about nuclear bomb design. The government eventually withdrew its objections after another newspaper published a different article about nuclear bomb design; the government’s view is that the second piece irrevocably let the cat out of the bag.
If any of our readers are knowledgeable about nuclear bomb design theory, and are for some incomprehensible reason inclined to read both articles for me (I think one is 10 pages and the other is 5), and (1) tell me what the overlap between the two is (since that will indicate what exactly the government thought were the most important secrets in the first article), and (2) give me some sense of just how nonobvious those items are (it would be better yet if he could give me a perspective on how nonobvious they were in 1979, but I realize that could be hard for most people to do today). What do you get out of this? Well, absolutely nothing, except my gratitude, a thank-you note in my law review article (and on the blog), and the knowledge that you have yet again Advanced The Cause Of Knowledge. Please e-mail at volokh at law.ucla.edu if you can be of help. (And, yes, I did try to find some UCLA grad student whom I could hire as a research assistant for this, but haven’t had much success.)
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