Howard Morland Howard Morland ( born September 14 , 1942 ) is an American journalist and activist against nuclear weapon s who , in 1979 , became famous for apparently discovering the " secret " of the hydrogen bomb ( the Teller – Ulam design ) and publishing it after a lengthy censorship attempt by the Department of Energy ( " United States v . The Progressive " ) . Because of some similarities in experience , he became outspoken in the protest against detention of Mordechai Vanunu . Career . Morland graduated from Emory University in 1965 and entered Air Force pilot training , at Lubbock , Texas , aspiring to a career in astronautics or commercial aviation . As a C - 141 jet transport pilot , he was trained to carry nuclear weapons as cargo . He noted that the full - size bomb casings used in training were astonishingly small , of a size that could easily be mishandled . His wartime assignment was flying from California to Vietnam two to three times a month , returning with combat veterans and the bodies of soldiers who were killed in the war . Having opposed the war since before it began , he left the Air Force and embarked on a two - year trip around the world starting and ending in Hawaii . In fifteen months abroad , he passed through two dozen countries of southern Asia , the Middle East , and Europe , acquiring a personal feel for cultural diversity and global issues . Back in Hawaii , he surfed big waves and flew ten - passenger " Twin Beech " aircraft on all - island aerial tours . As a flight instructor , he developed a novel method of teaching new students to land an airplane by the end of the first lesson . When Dennis Meadows , co - author of " The Limits to Growth " , gave a lecture in Honolulu , Morland took him surfing and was invited to join his new graduate study program at Dartmouth , where , after a year of course work , Morland joined the New England anti - nuclear Clamshell Alliance and became a full - time organizer . His objection to nuclear power was its potential for reactor melt - down , but his real concern was nuclear weapons , which he wanted to see abolished world - wide . In 1978 , magazine editor Sam Day recruited him to write a series of articles on nuclear weapons for " The Progressive " . Publication of his second article , " The H - Bomb Secret " , was blocked for six months by government intervention which provoked a landmark First Amendment legal case , United States v . The Progressive . The government ' s case for censorship collapsed when the information in question was shown to be in the public domain . Ironically , the court case produced new information that enabled Morland to correct a number of errors in his original article . The article is often erroneously described as a set of instructions for building a thermonuclear bomb , which Morland asserts can only be done by a nation state , five so far , and , anyway , the information is conceptual , no engineering details . Its purpose was to help energize the Ban - the - bomb movement and merge it with the broader Anti - nuclear movement . During the 1980s he worked on Capitol Hill as an arms - control lobbyist with the Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy , a group which under a slightly different name , during the Vietnam war era , had played a key role in forcing the House of Representatives to begin publishing recorded vote tallies on amendments to bills . Morland published the group ' s annual voting record , wrote articles , toured the college and activist lecture circuits , was active in the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign , and specialized in connecting activists from the most liberal , i . e . , most urbanized , Congressional districts to an annual effort to de - fund the Navy ' s Trident II D - 5 ballistic missile . At the end of the decade , he worked for the House of Representatives , as the military legislative analyst for the liberal Democratic Study Group . After the Cold War ended , he created multi - media training programs for a company started by a graduate school colleague , and started his own residential carpentry company , Morland Designs . In retirement , he participates in kayak races and works on Wikipedia articles about nuclear weapons and kayaking . His role in fixing errors in the Little Boy nuclear weapon article was mentioned in " The New Yorker " .