Ken Ford vs. The Feds

Wow. DOE overreach, post-9/11. The net effect over time will be to create a citizenry dangerously uneducated about nuclear weapons. I once met a Iranian who thought buildings in a city center could shield a bomb's blast from damaging the rest of the city. Crap like that. Article contains an interesting oversight, which I can spot after working at the Kirtland AFB Weapons Lab in ABQ in the 70's. The surface of the island of Elugelab wasn't so much vaporized as it was punched deep underwater, as the coral collapsed under the astonishing overpressure of the nuke. Know your nukes!:

The author, Kenneth W. Ford, 88, spent his career in academia and has not worked on weapons since 1953. His memoir, “Building the H Bomb: A Personal History,” is his 10th book. The others are physics texts, elucidations of popular science and a reminiscence on flying small planes.

He said he included the disputed material because it had already been disclosed elsewhere and helped him paint a fuller picture of an important chapter of American history. But after he volunteered the manuscript for a security review, federal officials told him to remove about 10 percent of the text, or roughly 5,000 words.

“They wanted to eviscerate the book,” Dr. Ford said in an interview at his home here. “My first thought was, ‘This is so ridiculous I won’t even respond.’ ”

In the late 70's I was a UNM work-study student at the Kirtland AFB Weapons Lab assigned to the group studying geology of the atolls, so as to understand weapons effects better. The big project of the day was the MX missile, which was supposed to run in underground tubes in the AZ desert west of Tucson, but after many billions were spent I understand they discovered the underpressure following the main shock wave of a single atom bomb striking the tube network would lead to instantaneous collapse of the entire network of tubes. That discovery forced a radical redesign of the program. The public story for the redesign was the program had become too expensive and had to be scaled back; the back story was they had inadvertently incorporated a fatal flaw.