Press: Letter Bomb

Printing atomic "secrets"

The presses started rolling at 2:30 a.m.

By dawn, staff members of the tiny Madison Press Connection (circ. 11,398) were distributing copies of an eight-page "extra" edition around Wisconsin's capital. The innocuous-sounding front-page headline: A CITIZEN WRITES TO A SENATOR. The incendiary subject: hydrogen bomb "secrets" with details and even a crude diagram. Whether any of it could result in an actual bomb would soon be bitterly debated. What was immediately clear was that the paper had blown apart the legal vises tightened against three other publications seeking to print H-bomb...

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