Samuel H. Day; Editor Fought to Publish Story on How to Build a Hydrogen Bomb
Samuel H. Day, a journalist and peace activist who, as managing editor of the Progressive magazine, oversaw publication of a landmark 1979 article on how to build a hydrogen bomb, has died.
He was 74 and died Jan. 26 at a hospital in Madison, Wis., after a stroke.
At the Progressive, Day battled government lawyers for six months to publish the work of a freelance writer named Howard Morland, who in early 1979 submitted an article and detailed sketches that he said would describe publicly for the first time how a thermonuclear bomb worked.
Claiming the article was classified, the federal government won a prior restraint order against the magazine, an unusual tactic that previously had been used in a failed attempt to block publication of the Pentagon Papers.
Arguing that its story was drawn from public records and therefore not classified, the Progressive prevailed in court, the result, in no small measure, of the dogged advocacy of Day.
“The H-bomb story would not have happened if not for Sam Day,” said Progressive Editor Matthew Rothschild, who described Day as a hero to many in the peace movement.
The article, titled “The H-Bomb Secret: How We Got It--Why We’re Telling It,” was published in November 1979. The event was hailed as a victory by defenders of 1st Amendment freedoms and raised the national profile of the Madison-based monthly, which covers matters involving peace and social justice.
Day not only waged a battle with the government to publish the piece, he guided it through many revisions and wrote its eloquent introduction and conclusion.
“The secret of how a hydrogen bomb is made protects a more fundamental ‘secret’: the mechanism by which the resources of the most powerful nation on Earth have been marshaled for global catastrophe. Knowing how,” the article stated, “may be the key to asking why.”
Release of the article was a career-defining moment for Day. But, oddly enough, it was the magazine’s confrontation with federal authorities that compelled him to leave journalism. What he really wanted, he wrote in his autobiography, “Crossing the Line,” was to foment “public defiance of nuclear secrecy,” to engage that battle more directly than being a writer and editor allowed.
In 1980, he resigned from the magazine to join an anti-nuclear weapons organization sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee. Over the next two decades, he would be arrested more than 25 times for acts of nonviolent civil disobedience to draw attention to the dangers of nuclear proliferation.
Day was an unlikely candidate for a rabble-rousing life. He was the son of a diplomat and attended exclusive Eastern schools, including Philips Exeter Academy and Swarthmore College.
After college and a two-year stint in the Army as an information specialist, he entered mainstream journalism, working for the Associated Press and the Lewiston Morning Tribune in Idaho.
By the 1960s he was a reporter at Idaho’s Intermountain Observer, a muckraking journal that examined issues of poverty, race and gender years before covering them became fashionable.
His first arrest came in 1969 when he reported on a University of Idaho symposium that had invited Tom Hayden, who was then facing trial with others of the Chicago Seven for disrupting the 1968 Democratic National Convention, as a speaker. Bitter debates over the Vietnam War marred the event, which Day reported without censoring Hayden’s profanity-laced speech.
The local sheriff and police chief pressed for Day’s prosecution on obscenity charges, resulting in a 1st Amendment controversy that gripped much of the state.
Later, his focus on the peace movement led him to become editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an anti-nuclear weapons publication founded by some of the scientists who built the first atomic bombs in the United States. He also founded Nukewatch, a national campaign to identify and trail the trucks used to transport nuclear weapons to military bases.
Described by Rothschild as a “lovable lefty” for his collegiality and sense of humor, Day maintained a steady schedule of protest into his last years, despite a serious handicap: While imprisoned for distributing anti-war literature at a federal facility in 1991, on the day after the Persian Gulf War began, he had a stroke that left him legally blind.
That did not prevent him from traveling widely as chairman of the Committee to Free Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli nuclear scientist jailed since the late 1980s for spilling Israel’s nuclear secrets to a British newspaper. Day was arrested in Israel three years ago when he and other activists attempted to inspect the military facility where Vanunu had worked and to expose it as a nuclear weapons plant.
His availability to press Vanunu’s case depended less on his health, as he once wryly noted, than “on whether I’m in jail.”
“I remain an Old Codger for Peace,” he wrote in his autobiography, “ready to continue my resistance and to recruit others to the cause . . . whatever the risk and whatever the pain.”
Day is survived by his wife, Kathleen; three sons; six grandchildren; a sister; and a brother.
