The time in 1950 when Han Bethe wrote about the H-bomb and the US government raided the offices of Scientific American and pulped or burned every copy of the magazine (while also accusing them of being pinko communists)https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2019/jan/09/fbi-bethe-banned-sciam/ …
Without wanting to be too critical, they have the story very wrong in many important ways. And they don't have a copy of the original on the site – that's just the (censored) one, as published by SciAm.
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(I have the uncensored version, as well as all of the behind-the-scenes discussion by the AEC and discussion with SciAm. The "US gov't raids SciAm and burns issues in act of censorship" is the way that SciAm spun the story later to great success. It's more complicated than that.)
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Sounds like it would make a good entry for your blog, or we would publish it at
@PhysicsToday -
Once I get out of my massive work backlog I'll think about it. It's a very interesting story (I spend a lot of time on it in my book) because there are a lot of dynamics that secrecy hides besides the obvious one of some censored sentences from an article.
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For example, the fact that SciAm's version of the story is the one that is "out there" (terrible censorship, forcing them to melt down the type, etc.) is a product of the same secrecy regime (the AEC was not allowed to give their version of the story, and SciAm exploited that).
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It's also part of an interesting story about the history of SciAm, as it remade itself from "wonky magazine for tinkerers" into "a magazine for the Cold War liberal scientific literati" under it editor Gerard Piel, who bought it in 1948.
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(Oh, and to address one thing: they did in fact melt down the lead type. But it was the SciAm editors who suggested it to the AEC as the best way to dispose of it! It was not imposed on them or done dramatically. But the newsmen knew to exploit such imagery to great effect!)
End of conversation
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