"IEMICM. AND EUB1HEEBIHB-
NEWS Editor:
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INFORMATION: IS IT HELD BACK? Government Information
Restriction
Program Erodes Free Press
.EVERY CHEMIST, every engineer, every chemical executive should read with special care the article, "Information: Is It Held Back?" (Government, page 4 5 2 0 ) . The threat to the freedom of the press in this country is real, despite the pious protestations of those who would hamstring it, that all they are asking is "voluntary" cooperation from the editors of newspapers, trade, business, scientific, and technical magazines and journals. Many of the country's most outstanding editors have watched with deep concern the tortuous gyrations of the Office of Strategic Information as it has attempted to justify many of its activities. The latest gimmick is t o set up the agency with at least two objectives that appear to us to be wholly incongruous and completely incompatible. In the one breath the agency announces one of its chief avowed purposes is to try to reduce the volume of information of an unclassified nature published in our scientific and technical journals, while in the next it intends b y means not at all made clear t o get more scientific and technical journals from Russia and other satellite nations into this country. Just how naive do those who dictate OSI policy think the Russians are? Again and again OSI has been forced to change rules, regulations, and policies when it has been demonstrated they wero unworkable or unnecessaryThe pressures being directed on editors from Washington are quite subtle and certainly are not understood by the American public. The implication is that many editors are either dumb or unpatriotic or both. Editors have been briefed in private sessions on subjects of an unclassified nature that they should voluntarily remove from their papers and journals. In the field of chemical technology, the list shown the writer of this editorial just about covered the chemical waterfront. In the meantime, at the Geneva "Atoms for Peace" Conference, editors of scientific and technical journals were stunned at the volume of information released officially. Obviously there is no over-all policy—only expediency. Small wonder editors are confused and disgusted. Editors agree completely with the thesis that any scientific or technical article (even though it contains nothing of a classified nature) undoubtedly conveys a certain amount of information to the Russians or t o anyone else who has the competency t o read it. If it did not, it would not be worth publishing. However, the progress of American science and technology has always rested on the wide and timely dissemination of this kind of information. If large areas of such knowledge are "blocked out," our country stands to lose more than it can possibly gain by following the "suggestions" made by government agencies here in Washington. The people who would like very greatly to restrict the press at this time have the mistaken idea that America pretty much has a monopoly on scientific and technical know-how and know-why; that if we only stop publishing, t h e Russians and the countries associated in the red bloc will be in total ignorance on scientific and technical matters. The fallacy of this belief was completely shattered a t Geneva. W e believe that by and large the editors of this country have followed an intelligent policy on what they print. It is the responsibility of government agencies to eliminate "leaks" of classified information whether they are deliberate or careless. The freedom of the press is one of our very fundamental rights. In other countries and in other times it has been taken away suddenly by government fiat-it can also be lost gradually in much the same way that a continuous drip, drip of water will eventually wear away the hardest stone.
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